The Book of Legendary Lands by Umberto Eco

Abstract

reviews don’t shed drops / of blood or sweat.” Such a stance with regard to literature and its conditions of possibility, materially evinced again and again in this collection, has liberating implications for writers of any sort—and for readers, too. Warren Motte University of Colorado Danica Vukićević. Visoki fabrički dimnjaci. Kraljevo, Serbia. Narodna Biblioteka Stefan Provovenčani. 2013. isbn 9788681355374 Danica Vukićević, a Serbian poet from Belgrade, offers us feminist social criticism in an often-fragmented free-verse form in Visoki fabrički dimnjaci (High smokestacks), her short sixth collection of poems. Her line lengths vary as do stanzas and lengths of parts—there is no uniformity here. Usually a poem is presented in one stanza with lines that vary from one to eleven words. Sometimes she is playful with words or makes up words, as in an untitled poem that begins “Let the dead continue to deaden,” or when she combines three words in one as “coldbrightshiny ” to describe the world and to say that this world “disappears and will again disappear and disappearing.” The poems also have little to no punctuation, and the ideas are disconnected fragments not always told from the first person . The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is interspersed with the Latin alphabet , borrowing from German such as “Sieben gegy Theben” and other foreign or English/international terms, such as “pizza.” Most of the poems seem to be social commentary. Children speak to a dead father, apologizing and describing the conditions in a socialist state. In “Two Aunts,” a portrait of two women who gave their lives to the state—one as a worker in a hide factory and another as a mother upset about missed chances in life and a lack of self-fulfillment. In another poem, the speaker wonders if she’s a terrible mother who writes poems and has forgotten to send “a snack with the kid or who swears in front of her daughter.” She writes mockingly about women who are always hoping for something, while the men in her poems don’t notice difficulties. Besides having several poems composed of lists, she also writes an elegy about her grandfather, about visiting his grave for All Saint’s Day with her grandmother as a child and not understanding why people ate there as if with the dead and brought hot coffee in a thermos. She ends the book with a poem that begins “Humanity is utopia” and ends “I, the herald of freedom . . .” These are intriguing poems, although the book’s title doesn’t seem to fit the collection as a whole. The feminist background of the author is clear. This is provocative material that begs for attention from its audience. Biljana D. Obradović Xavier University of Louisiana Miscellaneous Umberto Eco. The Book of Legendary Lands. Alastair McEwen, tr. New York / London. Rizzoli Ex Libris / MacLehose. 2013. isbn 9780847841219 / 9780857052872 One only has to read two or three of Umberto Eco’s books to discover that he has made the study of lies and forgeries central to his work in both fiction and nonfiction. Eco is one of the most influential and popular public intellectuals in Europe. His thinking covers everything from semiotics to narrative structure, from Kant to popular culture. Eco is also a serious academic scholar whose work has influenced a generation of young scholars. And then, of course, there are his novels. The Book of Legendary Lands is the fourth book in an ongoing series Eco is publishing with Rizzoli . Putting the merit of the text aside for the moment, these books, and The Book of Legendary Lands in particular, are beautiful artworks in themselves. The books are printed on high-quality paper and feature a number of spectacular photographs and illustrations. This collection is at home equally in research libraries as well as on coffee tables. Quite simply, they are centerpieces of thought and artistic expression. And although the books are fairly expensive (they cost just under $50 for a hardback), they are worth the investment by any selfrespecting bibliophile. The Book of Legendary Lands contains fifteen chapters, bookended by an introduction and comprehensive appendixes. Like the other volumes in the series, each chapter contains...