Umberto Eco, author of “The Name of the Rose”, dead at 84

His 1980 historical mystery novel The Name of the Rose, which has been translated into more than 40 languages, was a Gothic murder mystery set in an Italian Medieval monastery. He suffered a crisis of faith during this period, abandoning the Roman Catholic Church.

The author of three acclaimed novels, Eco also wrote numerous academic texts, children’s books and essays.

In later years, he contributed to newspapers and magazines.

From 1971 he held the chair of semiotics in the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest university, and published more than 20 nonfiction books on his research interests.

After taking his doctorate in 1954, Eco started working for the recently established national broadcasting network RAI preparing cultural programs and gaining a lasting interest in mass communication.

In 2003, Eco published a collection of lectures on translations, “Mouse or Rat?”

He told NPR’s Scott Simon last October that several of his novels like Foucault’s Pendulum and Numero Zero focused on characters that he affectionately termed “losers” – because “they are more interesting than the winners”. Always a staunch defender of the “complex”, Eco decried the appointment of Silvio Berlusconi as “strongly anti-intellectual”.

“Mickey Mouse can be ideal in the [same] sense that a Japanese haiku is”, Eco told The Guardian in a 2002 interview. “Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo”. In a book by the Renaissance philosopher Tommaso Campanella, a character says, ‘Wait, wait, ‘ and another man responds, ‘I can not’. “People are exhausted of simple things, they want to be challenged”, he said.

He leaves a wife, a German art teacher who he married in 1962 and with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Hillel Italie contributed from NY and Greg Keller from Paris.