The French don’t have cafes just because they like coffee. They love conversation, philosophical and political arguments, any kind of spirited talk about writing, ideas, culture. For many years, “Apostrophes” — in which noted authors discussed their work for an hour on Friday evenings — was the must-see program on French television. Very much in this Gallic tradition, “This Is Not the End of the Book” allows the American reader a chance to listen in as two smart and well-read men of letters chat about reading, the Internet, book collecting and odd byways of literary and cinematic history. The resulting discussion makes for quick-paced and absorbing intellectual entertainment.
Umberto Eco isn’t, of course, French, but he seems to know the language as well as his native Italian. Not only is he the author of world-renowned novels, starting with “The Name of the Rose,” but he is also a specialist in semiotics, a sometime newspaper columnist and one of the great private collectors of incunabula, that is, the books printed before the 16th century.
(Northwestern University) - “This Is Not the End of the Book” by Jean-Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco
In contrast, Jean-Claude Carriere is an eminent cinephile, a former head of the French film school and a frequent script collaborator with movie and stage directors, having worked with Luis Bunuel on “Belle de Jour” and Peter Brook on “The Mahabharata.” He, too, collects very old books and shares with Eco an interest in works about mankind’s follies, delusions and superstitions.
From the beginning of the discussion, and periodically throughout, Eco insists that “the book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered.” No Luddite, however, he confesses that if his house were on fire, he’d save his computer’s hard drive before any of his books because it holds all his writing of the past 30 years. Nonetheless, he insists that we cannot spend all our time reading on a screen — our eyes just won’t take it. I’m not so sure of that, but Eco certainly seems right in noting that the digital revolution has led to more widespread literacy: Just when we thought, in the wake of Marshall McLuhan, that we were becoming “a purely visual civilisation,” the computer returned us “to Gutenberg’s galaxy; from now on, everyone has to read.”
As the conversation ranges on, both men worry about the unreliability of online data: “What the Internet provides,” notes Carriere, “is gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy, and with the sources unchecked. So each of us needs not only to check facts, but also to create meaning.” Eco stresses that we have to learn how “to handle information whose authenticity we can no longer trust.” For Carriere “this tool — which is supposed to be comforting in its delivery of everything and anything — actually plunges us into great confusion.” Moreover, adds Eco, “discussions between people can only take place on the basis of a shared encyclopedia. . . . We expected globalisation to make everyone start thinking alike. What has actually happened is precisely the opposite: globalisation has led to the parcelling up of common experience into different camps.” The scholar-novelist further emphasizes the ephemeral, transient quality of online reading: “As soon as you click onto the next page you forget what you’ve just read, the very thing that has brought you to the page now on your screen.”
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