How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays - William Weaver

(THIS book is by umberto eco...but I somehow seem to have bungled up with regards to putting the name in the right box while writing the review...)

William Weaver, may god bless his tribe, for if it werent for his efforts at translating this book from its original italian version with so natural and smooth an accent and transition I amongst many others would have missed out on one helluva book! the book's name was enough to bring a smile-of-baffle to my face and intrigue me into buying it...it was a very quirky inter-relation being highlighted and I just had to know how and in what context...yet the very first few lines evoked that certain sense of deja-vu that one feels very often- things that happen to us yet we never mention them feeling they are not common or rather weird happenings only to run into a person at a party who is relating a similar story and we know exactly what he will say next yet we want to listen on just because it seems so much more fun!..and of course our disbelief that such could have befalled two people! well that certain feeling lasts for quite a good part in the book...in fact it reminded me a lot of ''meaning of liff'' and ''deeper meaning of liff'' by the late douglas adams... however the book is not one to be taken lightly...for when he starts on with ''on the impossibility of drawing a map of an empire on a scale 1:1'' things are more than just plain common sense...he gives reason to support this common sense and provides hypotheses of such depth that one actually wonders if Signor Eco did actually do some considerable 'field work' while trying to achieve such a map! ''three owls on a chest of drawers'' is something that I must confess is still beyond me...it is a study of an ancient italian sestina and apart from its strophic and metric structures (''rich in metasemantic results at the level of actantial structures as well'') , mention of pseudo-alliteration, a study of the Standard theory of the chest of drawers (!) and other ideas which are even too difficult to copy straight from the book even if I tried... yeah I know common human reaction, what we cant perceive amazes us till we can grasp it...

but seriously this book isnt just a bombastic bashing dealt to the reader, the verbiage is called upon very discreetly and only when exigent...the language is otherwise simple and the content rather amusing although at points one may ponder if such a book is worth reading outside the toilet! other essays include ''how to take an intelligent vacation'', how to justify a private library'', how to watch out for widows'', ''how not to use the fax machine'' ''how to eat in flight'' & ''how to recognise a porn movie'' amongst others. each one is a rib tickling side splitting narration and my only regret was that I read this book way too fast and it was finished way too soon!respect to da man! definitely one for the collection...

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