It's obvious she's had a lot of fun writing this one, and it makes it fun to read too. Not terribly deep, but still fun and informative.




His French and Spanish translations always come out earlier than others. I think this might have to do with the fact Eco is said to collaborate a lot to the translation work, especially in the languages he's fluent in. I guess this means he's not working on many translations at once, and seemingly he always starts with Spanish, then French.

This novel in particular must have been easier than usual to translate to French, as a very great deal of the sources and literary references Eco used are French, and so are many of the historical events happening or referred to in the book (a lot of it happens in Paris), and the protagonist's diary is written in French, so I think Eco might well have mimicked French mannerisms in the original Italian to render that, which would have made it all the easier to translate in French.

As always the translation by Jean-Noël Schiffano reads extremely well, and the edition is well done, so I guess he might have started working with Eco before the book was even out in Italy, as he's done for some of the earlier novels.




50 pages in. So far, so good but no alternate history/sf elements have come in yet. I kind of like the tone/style of the narrator so far.