Cover of How to travel with a salmon & other essays

Book 1994

How to travel with a salmon & other essays

3.97 44 readers shelved it

Publisher
Harcourt, Brace
Language
English
Published
1994
  • Italian essays
  • Translations into English
  • Essays
  • 18.29 Italian literature
  • Italian literature
  • Moeurs et coutumes
  • [études diverses]
  • Satire sociale

How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo - minimal diaries - after the magazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parody.".

These essays, written in the late eighties and early nineties, are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal taxi drivers, express mail, 33-function watches, fax machines and cellular phones, pornography, soccer fans, academia, and - last but definitely not least - the author's own self.

How to Travel with a Salmon gives us Umberto Eco's acute vision of the absurdities of modern life.