Misreadings

Playful parodies by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

In an upside-down Lolita, Umberto Umberto pursues a granny with "whitely lascivious locks." Professor Anouk Ooma of Prince Joseph's Land University addresses his colleagues on recent archeological findings that shed light on the poetry of Italy before the explosion. Columbus's landing in the New World is covered by television reporters, commentators, and guest experts. In addition, we are given a social and structural analysis of the art of striptease as performed by Lilly Niagara of the Crazy Horse; we are privy to in-house publisher reader's reports, most of them unfavorable, on such submissions as The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and the Five Books of Moses; and we hear a diatribe against the mounting tide of vulgarity in Greece, the New democratic "culture identity" of such upstarts as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato, not to mention public playing of the flute.

Umberto Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way has some penetrating comments to make about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art and criticism.