Travels in Hyperreality: Essays
Umberto Eco, William Weaver (translation)Eco's travelogue collects 26 dispatches, mostly written in the 1970s during the author’s visits to the U.S. In the essays, the theorist and novelist plays a classic role: the foreigner who is alternately amused & appalled by American maximalism. (A famously kitschy roadside inn, in Eco’s rendering, resembles “a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli”; Disneyland is “an allegory of the consumer society” whose “visitors must agree to behave like its robots.”)
But Eco’s postcards from the past are also infused with insight—& a sense of prophecy. They explore, in technicolor detail, what Eco calls our “faith in fakes.” Travel the country long enough, his trip suggests, & it becomes difficult to tell where the landscape ends & the dreamscape begins. — Megan Garber, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/05/summer-reading-2023/673948/