November 26, 2007

Questioning my Philistinism

One of my general faults is that I'm not much for literature. Only very rarely can I get into fiction, and forget about poetry. That's why I was so surprised this morning when one of my own literary opinions was confirmed by a famous author.

Today's newspapers hadn't made it to the breakfast table by the time I got there, so I started to look through yesterday's New York Times Sunday magazine. There I ran into a short interview with Umberto Eco. I was intrigued because he was asked about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which I found to be a kind of dumb version of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. And that's just what he said, more or less, alleging (and what an insult!) that Brown was one the characters he created for Foucault's Pendulum.

"So you created Dan Brown?" asked the interviewer. "Yes," was the answer.

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