SOURCE: “Hall of Mirrors,” in The New Statesman, Vol. 129, No. 543, February 26, 1999, p. 54.

In the following review, Holland assesses Eco's achievement in Serendipities.

Even scrapings from the table of a writer such as Umberto Eco should be accepted with gratitude. As Eco himself acknowledges, the essays in Serendipities are really nothing more than a collection of footnotes to an earlier and much more detailed work, The Search for the Perfect Language. The title of that book referred to an enduring and peculiar obsession in European culture: the belief that there had once been a language that had embodied the absolute essence of everything signified by its own grammar and vocabulary. Eco's concern in his new book is to demonstrate how the very lunacy of that quest served to breed accidental, unanticipated truths.

To justify the plural in his title, Eco offers a cursory overview of other, canonical, examples of...