When Samuel Beckett lived on Boulevard de Port-Royal, he offered a carpet to his upstairs neighbors so they wouldn’t hear them walking. Humans wandering over his head prevented him from thinking. The situation faced by Umberto Eco with his downstairs neighbors was more difficult to resolve: they had filed a complaint for immediate danger, fearing a collapse of his apartment in theirs. This was confirmed by an expertise of land registry officers. And for good reason: 1,200 rare old books on the occult sciences, magic, esotericism, imaginary worlds, as well as 30,000 contemporary volumes distributed in dozens of libraries. And as his accumulative madness was going crescendo, and his bibliophilic neurosis showed hardly any signs of exhaustion, he had to move to a new apartment in Milan where he remained for about thirty years until his death in 2016.
If we are to believe Umberto Eco. The World Library, the astonishing documentary by the Italian Davide Ferrario screened at the international Fipadoc festival which was recently held as every year in Biarritz, its new haven was located in the heights of a building. But it is not excluded that the considerable copyrights of the rose name and Foucault’s pendulum allowed him to own the floor below. You can never be too careful. A tsunami of books is not to be feared as long as it does not leave your home. Eco’s exclusive passion for them was such that he would not have hated dying under their weight in the chaos of a cataclysm rather than pancreatic cancer.
It was not only the library of a scholar, novelist, essayist, scholar, semiotician, philosopher of encyclopedic curiosity, but also that of an insatiable collector. There is no doubt that at this level, beyond the requirements of research, there was in him the bibliomaniac and the librarian. He beat both Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto Manguel and all three were well behind Dante. In the last song of Heaven, when he has a vision of God, the major poet of the Middle Ages describes it as the library of libraries.
By following him in the labyrinth of his shelves at attention, the only occasion in his life when this sportophobe engaged in a marathon, we are carried away in the spiral of tracking shots. He traveled miles there every day, not because he was looking for a volume (it was organized sector by sector) but because it was going to look for him. The documentary is interspersed with interviews (he was not stingy with them) granted by our Pic de la Mirandole but also testimonies from his widow, his children, his friends and his colleagues. Some because they lived willingly or by force with this mass of printed matter, others because the professor was generous with his knowledge and his wealth, and that his “bookstore”, in the sense that Montaigne understood it when he built it in the round tower of his Périgord castle, was welcoming.
He was so lavish with his words that the director ended up with more sounds than images. So he had the idea of also taking his camera to prestigious public libraries: the Reale in Turin, the Braidense in Milan, the Arturo-Graf at the University of Turin, the Comunale in Imola, the ‘Accademia delle scienze in Turin, the Stadtbibliothek in Ulm, the Kloster Bibliotekssaal in Wiblingen, the Stadtbibliothek in Stuttgart, the Stifstbibliothek in St. Gallen, the Vasconcelos in Mexico City, the Binhai in Tianjin. What books! What books!, one would be tempted to lament at the end of this ninety-minute journey, like Mac Mahon visiting towns devastated by a flood of the Garonne and sighing: “What water … so much water!” To which the prefect who accompanied him replied: “And again, Mr. President, you only see the top!” Of his own treasures, Umberto Eco knew the covers as well as the pages. He willingly quotes Funes, the hypermnesiac whom Borges made a character who remembered everything he had read so much that it prevented him from thinking correctly.
The Eco family donated the library to the Italian state. It is now shared between the University of Bologna where he taught for a long time and the Braidense National Library in Milan. As for the film, it ends with an apology for silent research as the only access to the truth.
