Inventing the Enemy

Umberto Eco

Random House India

240 pages, R599

The latest collection of essays from one of the world’s most esteemed writers. Eco discusses ideas that have inspired earlier novels as well as the theme that runs through his most recent novel, The Prague Cemetery, that every country needs an enemy, and if it doesn’t have one, must invent it. Other topics include St Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, censorship, violence, and Wikileaks.