mandris értékelése miatt vettem kezembe ezt a könyvet, nem is nagyon tudok mit hozzáfűzni. Nagyon élvezetes olvasmány volt, fikciókkal is vetekszik a figyelem lekötésében. Legszívesebben az egészet kiidéztem volna, de olvassátok inkább így, egyben, érdemes. ( )

What a breath of fresh air: to read a genius on a tricky subject who writes clearly and simply.

Eco explores the unspoken agreements between writer and reader of fiction.

If this is a translation into English, then the translation is marvelous. ( )

By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. -- Umberto Eco

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods records a series of lectures that Professor Eco delivered in 1993. The concern is narrative and the distance between fictional truth and actual or historical truth. This is but one target in the copse of topics. The ideal reader is but another. Joyce is quoted saying that the ideal reader for [b:Finnegans Wake|11013|Finnegans Wake|James Joyce|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1336408055s/11013.jpg|322098] would have an ideal insomnia. There are also distinctions made between a level one read (pleasure seeker) and a second level of reader which is a more serious bent, one seeking verisimilitude amidst a tangle of symbols and allusions.

These are enjoyable tangents across the face of fiction, A scholar's wink to the necessity of narrative. Eco states so at the collection's conclusion. "It offers us the opportunity to employ limitlessly our faculties for perceiving the world and reconstructing the past."
( )

Obviously I'm obsessed with Eco and nobody can stop me. Again, part of this is that he's extremely well-read and I like his taste and so I pick up his books looking for reading recommendations as much as anything else. Mostly what I picked up from this is that I've got to read [b:Sylvie|337463|Sylvie|Gérard de Nerval|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1173854772s/337463.jpg|1444752] by Nerval and will do so probably in the fall.

It's great to just read about writing, to read about fiction, because really it's all I want to talk about in my day-to-day life. I like what Eco puts words around in regard to the reader's suspension of reality. How we'll accept any internally-consistent world, how we will trust the author and the story in a way we wouldn't outside of the novel. He analyses the rules and expectations of writing that make it work and the thing is that it's all stuff the reader implicitly knows. I was reminded of the course I took in cognitive linguistics where we spent ages discussing why the human brain understood something in a second. We know how stories work even if we have never tried to describe how we know, or what it is that we're responding to, or anything. I can see people feeling frustrated by an in-depth discussion of something that seems "obvious" or automatic, but I love it whether or not it matters.

I love the evocation of living within the works, how the places can take on their own reality. It really seems as if Eco paces through those fictional woods and that we go with him. I also love the discussion of characters that take on their own reality, as its something that's fascinated me for a while now. What is it that made those characters alive?

It's also interesting reading this book after having read [b:The Prague Cemetery|10314376|The Prague Cemetery|Umberto Eco|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327902035s/10314376.jpg|14511050], because in the final lecture you can see that he is heading very clearly towards that book, and might have already started writing it. ( )

http://moloch981.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/sei-passeggiate-nei-boschi-narrativi/ ( )