Test: The Interview- 1 - Class 12 MCQ

The Interview by Christopher Silvester is an excerpt taken from his Penguin Book of interviews. In this, he talks about various opinions of the celebrities regarding an interview; its functions, methods and merits. It also consists of an excerpt from an interview with the infamous writer Umberto Eco.

The Interview by Christopher Silvester is an excerpt taken from his Penguin Book of interviews. In this, he talks about various opinions of the celebrities regarding an interview; its functions, methods and merits. It also consists of an excerpt from an interview with the infamous writer Umberto Eco.

Eco replies that just like the universe has empty spaces, our lives too, have a lot of empty spaces or 'interstices', as he calls them. Whenever he has a few moments to spare in between two different tasks, instead of wasting them, he uses the time to write.

Interview is considered as a reliable source of truth. Contemporaries and their success can be read through the interviews. A very important part of journalism is interview now a days.

Umberto Eco firstly considered himself as an academic scholar because he was a professor and wrote many academic texts while he wrote his first novel at the age of 50 accidently.

Some primitive cultures believed that photographing a person is no less than stealing his/her soul out of the body and rendering him incomplete and slighted.

Umberto Eco was essentially an academician who pursued his scholarly pursuits through academic writings. He wrote about forty non¬fictions and as he himself says, ‘he became a novelist by accident’. That was the reason he started writing novels at the age of almost fifty. Eco considers himself ‘a university professor who writes novels (only) on Sundays’. He is not even very sure about any one single reason for the huge success of his novel ‘The Name of the Rose’. He feels perhaps the timing of the novel’s publication was the most important factor of its success. The fact that at one level it appears to be a detective yarn but also delves into metaphysics, theology and medieval history also adds to its appeal. Though the novel is quite a heavy reading experience, it attracted a mass audience and made Eco popular more as a novelist rather than an academic scholar.

An interview is essentially a structured conversation where one participant asks questions, and the other provides answers. In common parlance, the word "interview" refers to a one-on-one conversation between an interviewer and an interviewee.

Umberto Eco feels elevated on calling him a professor. People think that he is doing many things but he concludes of doing himself the same thing. It is because that Umberto Eco had some philosophical interest which he followed in his novels and other academic work. His children books are based on peace and non-violence. There is a touch of philosophical and ethical interest as well.

Umberto Eco prefers himself to be called an academician rather than a novelist. He wrote more than 40 philosophical writings against just five novels. He started writing novels just by accident and that too at a late age of 50. Modesty and honesty are the signs of a great writer like Eco. Mukund Padmanabhan asks the reason behind the huge success of ‘The Name of the Rose’. Umberto honestly replies that the success of this novel is a mystery even to him. Perhaps, he wrote it at an appropriate time. Had it been written 10 years before or after, perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a huge success.