Umberto Eco is the offspring of Roland Barthes and Jorge Luis Borges. In his role as semiotician and interpreter of, among other things, Superman comics, he is Barthesian; in his pursuit of arcane, mediaeval European texts, of areas of Western tradition so little known as to seem imaginary, and in his meticulous, self-ironicising scholasticism, he is a follower of Borges. In this mode, one never knows (to give him the benefit of the doubt) when he is serious. The central thread running through his novel The Name of the Rose, the lost text of an Aristotelian tradition, a poetics of comedy rather than of tragedy, is a Borges-like fantasy, the difference being that Borges would have expended about five pages on it and woven it into some sort of mocking, erudite parable, while Eco composes a rather longer work.

Serendipities, for a change a short book, is Eco in his Borgesian mode; its first part, in particular, is closer to his fictionalising preoccupations than to his work as a semiotician. The first section, indeed, gives this book its title, for it is here that, as Eco puts it,

I wanted to show how a number of ideas that today we consider false actually changed the world (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) and how, in the best instances, false beliefs and discoveries totally without credibility could then lead to the discovery of something true (or at least something we consider true today).

Thus, the way that Western history is both creatively and disruptively dotted with cultural misreadings (and, in his concern with ‘misreading’ and the arcane, Eco displays an affinity with an older contemporary, Harold Bloom) is sketched suggestively by him in the first chapter.

Here, we are told, among other things, about ‘Marco Polo's mistaken identification of a rhinoceros for a unicorn’ or ‘how Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is led him to seek a more direct route to the East via the West and thus fortuitously “discover” America’. In the subsection on Columbus, entitled ‘The Flat Earth’, we are given interesting and persuasive background information about debates in the Christian mediaeval world concerning the earth's shape, and told that it knew of the earth's roundness for quite some time before it publicly acknowledged the fact; Eco says confidently, ‘Naturally Ptolemy knew the earth was round, otherwise he would not have been able to divide it into 360 degrees of meridian.’

This brings us to the doggedly backward-looking nature of Eco's brief explorations in this book, as he attempts to substitute a list of ‘misreadings’ for a myth of origins (as if almost every interesting idea in history had somehow arisen from some form of misunderstanding) and his relative lack of engagement with contemporary instances of misreading, however lunatic these might seem (the subtitle of the book is ‘Language and Lunacy’). For instance, there is a small but vocal group of people in America who still believe that the world is flat and that its alleged roundness is a hoax; one wonders whether this misreading (if, indeed, that is what it is) has had any serendipitous benefits for humankind. It is probably too early to tell.

It is really the first chapter, then, that is about the ‘serendipities’ of the title. Much of what remains has to do with another of Eco's enthusiasms: the idea of universal language (for instance, in what language did God speak to Adam?) This is not unlike the problems and ideas dealt with by structuralism and post-structuralism: Saussure's idea (and Saussure is mentioned in the second chapter) that communication involves a straightforward give-and-take between ‘addresser’ and ‘addressee’, assuming that both share a common social code, language, and the post-structuralist (specifically, Derridean) critique of Saussure's notion that it is possible to have an exchange of meanings uncomplicated by misunderstanding, or, as, Derrida would have it, ‘deferral’. Contemporary ideas of cultural misreading or misrepresentation owe not a little to this insight, although Eco's account of misreading is altogether more benign than that of theorists like Edward Said, who has devoted a lifetime's work to documenting the colonising West's wilful misreading, or misrepresentation, of the Orient. Eco's own book is not so much Eurocentric as largely incurious, in spite of the expected colourful references to Marco Polo, about the non-Western world. This is a pity, because it leaves out the story of Orientalist scholars, like William Jones, and Indian intellectuals in 19th-century India, surely one of the most important narratives of cultural exchange of the last 200 years, the discovery by the West of what came to be seen as the ur-language of the Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and the creative misreadings and exchanges that, in the end, altered the world-views of both parties so profoundly.