Chapter the-interview: The Interview | Short Questions

Rudyard Kipling held an extremely condemnatory attitude towards interviews. He famously called the process immoral, cowardly, and a vile crime that equated to a physical assault on a person. He firmly believed no respectable man would ever ask for or grant an interview. However, his strong views were deeply hypocritical. The text points out that despite his intense hatred for being interviewed, Kipling himself had perpetrated the exact same "assault" by interviewing the famous writer Mark Twain a few years earlier.

Umberto Eco’s secret to his staggeringly large output lies in his brilliant time management concept called "interstices." He believes that our lives are full of empty spaces, just like the gaps between atoms in the universe. Instead of wasting these brief moments, such as the time spent waiting for an elevator, Eco utilizes them productively to work on his writing. By constantly working in these small, hidden gaps of time, he effortlessly manages to produce a massive volume of academic and creative work.

Umberto Eco strictly identifies himself as a university professor who happens to write novels on Sundays. Despite his massive global fame as the author of "The Name of the Rose," he deeply connects with the academic community. He attends academic conferences regularly rather than participating in meetings of Pen Clubs or writers' associations. He views his philosophical and semiotic research as his true profession, considering his novel writing as a secondary, accidental pursuit that satisfies his deep personal taste for storytelling and narration.

The English novelist and academic David Lodge was completely astounded by the sheer volume and variety of Umberto Eco's work. He once remarked that he could not understand how one single man could accomplish all the things Eco did. Eco was writing complex academic texts, literary fiction, children's books, and newspaper articles. Lodge’s impression highlights Eco's formidable reputation as a highly prolific intellectual superstar who managed to master multiple writing genres while maintaining his rigorous university teaching responsibilities simultaneously.

Eco's American publisher seriously misjudged the immense potential of "The Name of the Rose" because of its heavy, intellectual subject matter. The novel dealt intricately with medieval history, theology, and metaphysics. The publisher assumed that American readers, who had no experience with medieval cathedrals or Latin studies, would not buy it. Consequently, she only gave Eco an advance for three thousand copies. However, the book defied all expectations and became a massive sensation, selling between two and three million copies in the US alone.