eco & lee

Literary greats die all the time. Relatively speaking, that is. So i don't usually make note of great literary passings here on this blog. But when two literary greats, one on each side of the Atlantic, both of whom have had their greatest work made into great movies, die on the same day, then i guess yes, that is pretty much worth commemorating.

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i first read Harper Lee back in secondary school -- i think i was 14 at the time. Of course i loved To Kill A Mockingbird. How could you not. There was that narrative voice, with that endearingly tomboyish name, and so endearingly precocious and cute and good-hearted. Then there were the textures of small town life in the American South, so lovingly rendered in such seductively liquid prose. And of course Atticus Finch, whom i proceeded to (of course) have a crush on, because, how could you not with a man like that. Even if he was fictional.

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It's been years since i last even looked at that book. i've always wanted to go back to it, to see if it's still as good as i remember, to see if there's anything i missed the first time i read it (i'm sure i missed lots), to see if i'm still the same person. But i just never really got round to it. Too many books, too little time. Maybe someday.

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Umberto Eco was a slightly later discovery. Oddly, although i can distinctly remember reading and loving The Name of the Rose sometime when i was in university, i cannot remember anything else about the novel except that it involved a detective-monk, and a library, and a twist in the tale that had something to do with (literally) poisonous books. i tried reading Foucault's Pendulum after that, but gave up less than halfway through. i guess it was just not the right time. 

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The other book by Eco that i do remember with great fondness is his satirical essay collection, How To Travel With A Salmon. That one was definitely a game-changer for me when i read it in university -- i think i must have borrowed it from a community library in London. It was that book that introduced me to satire, to snark and cynicism, to the pleasures of intellectual one-up-man-ship. (It was these exact same things that turned me off the book when i went back to it a few years ago. Oddly enough, i just borrowed it again from the library last week, mainly because i remember it as being very funny, and right now, what i want most out of my reading material is to be entertained. It's still funny, but not in a laugh-out-loud way. At some point in my life, i guess, that brand of show-offy, clever humour just stopped appealing to me that much.)

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Both writers have lived long and prospered, in their own individual ways. They died at a ripe old age. i'm assuming theirs were lives well-lived, by whatever measures they chose for themselves. One could do much worse than that.

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