SOURCE: “The Fruits of Error,” in The Spectator, Vol. 282, No. 8903, March 27, 1999, p. 41.

In the following review, Chaudhuri addresses the lack of an Eastern cultural perspective in Serendipities.

Umberto Eco is the offspring of Roland Barthes and Jorge Luis Borges. In his role as semiotician and interpreter of, among other things, Superman comics, he is Barthesian; in his pursuit of arcane, mediaeval European texts, of areas of Western tradition so little known as to seem imaginary, and in his meticulous, self-ironicising scholasticism, he is a follower of Borges. In this mode, one never knows (to give him the benefit of the doubt) when he is serious. The central thread running through his novel The Name of the Rose, the lost text of an Aristotelian tradition, a poetics of comedy rather than of tragedy, is a Borges-like fantasy, the difference being that Borges would have expended about five pages on...