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Comment by r0muald | Hacker News Reader

This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language.

That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and a not-too-well-simulated, ironic distance, makes him a top artist by any standard.

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There's an internet subculture that might appeal to you: people who write elaborate, thoroughly scathing reviews on Amazon for widely admired masterpieces.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2010/04/03/mean_amazon_reviews_open2010...

If that quote shows how overrated he is, I should read more of his stuff.

Interesting. Mind recommending someone else we ought to read instead?

I always recommend Italo Calvino. An underrated Italian writer IMHO. The Baron In The Trees or the Invisible Cities are a good start.

While Calvino is great, I wouldn't call someone who won a Nobel prize for literature underrated.

Calvino did not win the Nobel. The latest Italian to win it was Dario Fo.

Calvino is one of the most well know Italian writer abroad. Not underrated at all.

Incidentally translated into English by the same man that translated most of Umberto Eco's work, the late great William Weaver.

I remember that my teacher of Italian in high school asked us to read: "The Path to the Nest of Spiders".

That's Calvino's first novel, and it has a completely different style - and is much more boring as far as I remember- from everything he wrote afterwards. I think it was often chosen in Italian high schools for political reasons - it's a story about the Italian resistenza, the fight of partisans against fascists from which the modern Italian republic was born.

His subsequent novels and collections of short stories depart completely from that neo-realistic style. The way to describe them is possibly "a literary Bach" - his stories seem to develop fantastic themes in an endlessly imaginative way, exploring all the possibilities afforded by the theme, (loose) internal consistency and language. My favourites are "Cosmicomics" and "The invisible cities" .

I have read all of Eco's novels and enjoy his work very much. Other authors I like are Borges, Calvino, and Mulisch.

I love Eco, Borges, and Calvino—but have never heard of Mulisch. I'll have to check him out—thanks!

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