Question

If the interviewer Mukund Padmanabhan had not got the space in the newspaper to reproduce the interview verbatim, he may have been asked to produce a short report of the interview with the salient points. Write this report for him.

[The teacher should be able to help the pupils in what to include and what can be omitted. We could also provide a short report of an interview as a sample.]

Answer 1

Umberto Eco, A Scholarly novelist

By Mukund Padmanabhan, Interviewer

I was fortunate enough to interview Umberto Eco, an accomplished novelist and a professor at University of Bologna, Italy. He was well known for his scholarly works on semiotics, literary analysis and medieval aesthetics. His literary works include fictional stories, academic articles, essays, newspaper articles and children’s stories.

A depersonalized and merely casual approach in his writing marks his work different from others. This makes his writing style engaging and more appealing. His writings depict the stories of his research instead of being formal and monotonous.

He explained to me how he is able to consume his idle time into writing. The time we generally waste in idleness, he calls them ‘interstices’, He uses such time to complete his works.

Despite having the fame of a novelist, Umberto Eco still calls himself an 'a university professor who writes novels on Sundays’. He generously said that he has published over 40 scholarly articles and attended numerous academic conferences.

When I asked him about the cause of the success of the novel ‘The Name of the Rose’, he said that it is still a puzzle to him. Neither he nor his publishers were able to predict its success.

His demeanour was lively and he enthusiastically answered all my questions. He even revealed his private schedules and working process.