Umberto Eco Interview: I Was Always Narrating

Interview with the late Italian novelist Umberto Eco, author behind the bestselling novel ‘The Name of the Rose’. With great warmth and humour Eco shares how he has always taken pleasure in telling stories, and how he came to write his first novel. “I realised that even though I started writing novels at the age of 48, I was always narrating. Even my academic papers had the form of a narration.” Eco wrote poems when he was 16 – like every other 16-year-old boy: “Writing poetry and practising masturbation is a typical phenomenon of that age.” To Eco, the great difference between prose and poetry is that in poetry words come first whereas with prose the world – the image – forms the beginning and the language has to follow the story. His first novel ‘The Name of the Rose’ from 1980 (sold in approx. 14 million copies world-wide at the time of Eco’s death) arose when Eco had a full professorship, had published 50 books and was translated into several languages: “I was at the point in a life where you eithe