OF MOUSETRAPS AND MEN

I’ve never before written a fan letter regarding a book review, but I must express my thanks for Richard Eder’s thoughts on Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum” (Book Review, Nov. 5),which I have not yet read and probably never will.

When “The Name of the Rose” was published to so much acclaim, I felt like a skunk at a lawn party. Throughout his novel, Mr. Eco grandstanded his own erudition in tedious tangents to an otherwise nifty story. I found the writing just plain literary bad manners. Even worse, the book “turned off” many college-aged readers who might otherwise have learned from and enjoyed a fascinating period and milieu.

You’ve summed it all up in writing that a novel is not a truffle hunt, nor should it be a mousetrap. Thank you. Literature is not an adjunct of aesthetic theology. That’s another way of saying that the structuralist arguments make me scream.

PATRICIA DAVIS

WEST HOLLYWOOD