The release date of the final book by the Italian novelist Umberto Eco, who died on 19 February, has been pushed forward from May 2016 to come out this weekend in Italian.
Pape Satàn Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society is a collection of Eco’s essays that have previously been published in Italian weekly magazine L’Espresso since 2000, Eco’s publishers La Nave di Teseo said.
“Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe” is the opening line of Canto VII of Inferno, the first part in Dante’s 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy. The line is famous for puzzling translators, with modern academics believing it is a demonic invocation. The title is “sufficiently liquid to characterise the confusion of our times”, according to the blurb on Amazon.
Eco’s publisher La Nave di Teseo is a new publishing house that formed because notable writers, including Eco, feared the creation of a monopoly in Italian publishing after publishing company Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, owned by the family of former Italian prime minister and billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, bought book publisher RCS Libri in 2015. Eco personally donated €2m to help fund La Nave di Teseo, while Arnoldo Mondadori Editore now has a market share of around 38% of book publishing in Italy.
In an interview with la Repubblica on Monday, head of La Nave di Teseo Elisabetta Sgarbi called the new book “an ironic book, as withering as he was” and said Eco was “a tireless worker”.
“I really cannot think of Umberto in the past ... In Via Jacini, in our home, we hoped to see him work again,” she said. “Just today I found a drawing dedicated to ‘Alamo’, a name that we thought to give to the publisher, then discarded.”
The publication or release date for an English translation of Pape Satàn Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society has yet to be announced by Eco’s English publisher, Harvill Secker. Eco, who was most well-known for his 1980 mystery The Name of the Rose, wrote seven novels, three children’s books and an extensive catalogue of essays and non-fiction.
