Comment voyager avec un saumon
1992
- italian essays
- translations into english
- essays
- 18.29 italian literature
- italian literature
- moeurs et coutumes
- [études diverses]
- satire sociale
- essais (genre littéraire)
- études diverses
The story
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.
What it’s like
Short, sharp columns that read like a clever friend thinking aloud over coffee: crisp conversational sentences, deadpan observation, and a habit of turning everyday annoyances (airline meals, fax machines, express mail, a 33-function watch) into small puzzles of absurdity. The texture is intellectual but never stuffy, with footnote-style asides and the occasional arch flourish. Its vibe is wry, bright, and quietly melancholy about modern life, the kind of book that rewards a lazy afternoon or a stretch of waiting in an airport lounge, since each piece lands in a few pages and can be picked up at any point. The emotional register stays amused and affectionate, with satire aimed more at systems and habits than at people, and the closing self-portraits add a warm, self-deprecating note. Intensity is very low: no violence, no gore, no fear, and any sexual material is discussed analytically and without explicitness. This suits readers who enjoy essayistic humour, cultural observation, and Italian literary wit, and who want something gentle, intelligent, and easy to put down and return to.
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