The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay (Hardcover)

~ Umberto Eco (Author), Alastair McEwen (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Michael Dirda These past few weeks have been, to paraphrase Keats, the season of lists and mellow fruitfulness, a time of extravagance, overabundance and desperation. In the heady days before Christmas, children write to Santa Claus enclosing Homeric catalogues of the toys and games they pine for. To send out holiday greetings grown-ups consult the blackened pages of old address books -- or call up the alphabetized contacts database on their computers. All through December, parents scurry through malls, clutching scraps of paper upon which are scribbled sizes, brand names and crucial details about color and price. In grocery stores, shoppers methodically check off the exotic foodstuffs needed for the seasonal feasting. And then, after the desperate gaiety of New Year's Eve, everyone pauses for a moment, peers down with horror at the number on the bathroom scale and adds the usual item to the New Year's resolutions. Oh, "the infinity of lists," as scholar and novelist Umberto Eco titles this handsome album! Only the very young or very feckless manage to escape from the inexorable dictates of schedules, calendars, in-boxes, deadlines, memoranda. Without them, how would we ever manage to get our work done on time, or be sure that there's food in the cupboard, or that our checkbook balances, or that all our children's friends are invited to the birthday party? Lists are everywhere in our lives -- even in the opening paragraphs of book reviews. In his new book, Eco -- best known for his medieval mystery "The Name of the Rose," but also a distinguished expert on semiotics, the study of verbal and nonverbal communication -- focuses on the catalogue in literature and the representation of superabundance in painting. He does note how some music, such as Ravel's "Bolero" with "its obsessive rhythms," suggests "that it could continue infinitely." But for the most part, Eco sticks to poets, novelists and painters, seeking to interpret the implications of lists and inventories, to reflect on the clearly finite and the sometimes apparently infinite. In one of my favorite chapters, Eco describes rhetorical devices, or tropes, used in listmaking, such as asyndeton, the avoidance of conjunctions. For example, I left out "and" when speaking of "schedules, calendars, in-boxes, deadlines, memoranda." Asyndeton conveys the impression that a series could go on forever. In my immediately following sentence, I employed polysyndeton, in which a conjunction -- in this case "or" -- appears between each activity mentioned. Such repetition creates a feeling of almost naive breathlessness or awe, as if the writer, overwhelmed by the number of choices, can only point to an item there and another here and still another over there and . . . "The Infinity of Lists" doesn't only contain Eco's reflections. It's also a companion to his work at the Louvre Museum as a visiting scholar and curator. As a result, the book is packed with full-color illustrations, mostly paintings depicting crowded battle scenes, the multitude of the heavenly host, innumerable flowers in fields or vases, a library's shelf after shelf of book after book. One double-page spread is filled by Andy Warhol's not quite identical Campbell's soup cans. To complement these pictorial lists, Eco also includes catalogue arias from the Bible, Rabelais, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, James Joyce and many other writers. Consider, for instance, the wonderfully "incongruous" list found in a Chinese encyclopedia invented by the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. There the world's animals are divided into "(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies." Given his association with the Louvre, Eco naturally discusses the hodgepodge of artifacts zealously collected by connoisseurs, museums and medieval churches. "In St. Vitus' Cathedral, in Prague, you can find the craniums of St. Adalbert and St. Wenceslas, St. Stephen's sword, a fragment of the Cross, the table cloth used for the Last Supper, one of St. Margaret's teeth, a fragment of St. Vitalius' shinbone, one of St. Sophia's ribs, St. Eoban's chin, Moses' rod, the Virgin's dress." By the way, note the repeated use of asyndeton in the previous two paragraphs. Though "The Infinity of Lists" covers a great deal of ground, its various chapters are all too brief -- and thus tantalize more often than not. One hungers for further detail, greater amplification. When, for instance, Eco alludes to the pleasure of reading good book catalogues, he abruptly stops short just when we expect to learn how the critic Mario Praz found pleasure in "even uninteresting catalogues." Moreover, shouldn't there be some discussion of the Renaissance art of memory, which allowed impossibly long lists and texts to be learned by heart, or much more about that perennial element of love poetry, the "laudatio puellae," the detailed praise of the beloved woman's body from top to toe? Eco obviously recognizes how much he's left out and admits in his introduction that this mixture of essay, anthology and illustrated catalogue "cannot but end with an etcetera." Still, if hardly definitive, "The Infinity of Lists" is nonetheless a superb sampler, with something instructive or amusing on every page -- and plenty of examples of the charm and shock accompanying any good list. "You must sympathize," say the innocent country girls in Italo Calvino's novel "The Nonexistent Knight." "Apart from religious services, tridua, novenas, work in the fields, threshing, the vintage, the whipping of servants, incest, fires, hangings, invading armies, sack, rape, and pestilence, we have seen nothing." Of course, these girls do live sheltered lives. [e-mail]
Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

"Eco's short and often pithy chapter introductions, the gorgeous displays of exemplary art, and the generous experts from original texts are a tour de force of curation."
—ForeWord Magazine

"....a very beautifully produced illustrated volume from Rizzoli, and there’s a positively Millerian moment in it."
—National Review

"...a splendidly illustrated monograph, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay (Rizzoli) ...is, in essence, a tour through art, literature, and music based on the theme of lists, an investigation of the phenomenon of cataloging and collecting. Additionally, Eco maintains that the impulse to accumulate, to collect, is a reoccurring passion in Western culture."
—The Morning News

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: Rizzoli (November 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0847832961
• ISBN-13: 978-0847832965
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #13,877 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A List of Lists, Using Lists as Examples, January 16, 2010

By	Sacramento Book Review "SacramentoBookReview.com" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews

In a lavishly illustrated collection of art, Umberto Eco (//The Name of the Rose//) uses mostly Classical pieces to explore the concept of lists, catalogs, and those that create them. He moves from the differences between lists and catalogs to the various forms of lists--practical and poetic. The practical list is one with a purpose, a shopping list, a guest list, a inventory of items, whereas a poetic list is one that evokes a feeling, a sense of time, place or mystery--Homer's list of ships in the //Illiad// are less necessary as an accurate list, but more to create the overwhelming feel of unity and strength in the Greek invasion of Troy. //The Infinity of Lists// is a product of Eco's residency at the Louvre, where he organized several conferences and exhibitions on the subject of lists and list makers.

Eco takes a subject and after a brief essay provides reproductions of art and text to illustrate his thesis. In the chapter "Lists of Places" he name drops a number of quick references of authors and artists that used lists to illustrate their subjects--James Joyce in //Finnegans Wake// with lists of rivers--and then excerpts from texts illustrated by multiple full-color illustrations. "Places" includes a list of countries from the Book of Ezekiel, part of Chapter 1 of Dickens' //Bleak House//, and Edgar Allan Poe's description of members of a crowd from "The Man of the Crowd." //Lists// is less a book to be read cover to cover, and more one to sample, moving from illustration to essay. The hundreds of illustrations range from mosaics of antiquity to recent modern art, as does the text. While Eco doesn't adequately survey much of the modern world, "the Mother of all Lists," as he calls the Internet, only gets a single paragraph; his primary focus of Classic to Renaissance art and list-making is meat enough for hours of additional research (probably using the Mother of all Lists) and enjoyment.

Reviewed by Ross Rojek

18 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eco's Latest Literary Trend, November 19, 2009

By	Alex Broudy (State College, PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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In 2007 Bompiani published a similar non-fiction work by Umberto Eco, "Dall'Albero al Labrinto: Studi Storici sul Segno e l'Interpretazione," that investigated the histories of sign and interpretation alongside the history of encyclopedistics. Its aim was to more fully examine organization as a human phenomenon. "The Infinity of Lists," I believe, continues this examination by identifying the nature of lists across time. In short, Eco appears to be following a particular trend with his recent research - one that explores our immense fascination with the organization of content and its many forms.