The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Theodore Bikel Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Name of the Rose
Book Review: Whodunit with Semiotics
Summary: 5 Stars
It has been said that The Name of the Rose was one of the most purchased, most displayed, and least read bestsellers. This notion expressed a belief that at least more people wanted to be perceived as sophisticated enough to read the book than wanted to make the effort of reading it.
On one level, The Name of the Rose is a decent whodunit set in an isolated northern Italian medieval monastery. William of Baskerville is our Sherlock and Adso, his young assistant, is the unlearned neutral narrator (His neutrality is seemingly due to lack of sufficient understanding to put a sophisticated gloss on his reporting - but he is writing the story decades later.). Upon their arrival, the abbot asks William to investigate the death of one of the monks. As he does so, the bodies pile up, a number of potential suspects and motivations are suggested and then rejected as the suspects themselves become victims. (In that regard, William echoes TV detectives who come to solve one murder, fail to stop several more, but then compensate by solving them all. See, for example, Midsomer Murders - The Early Cases Collection).
Mixed in with the mystery, however, are discursions in semiotics, hermeneutics, biblical analysis, religious debate, literary theory, and medieval history. And what would a medieval mystery be without the inquisition?
The Name of the Rose is a ludicrously difficult book to read if one insists upon understanding everything that one is reading. The book has spawned at least two book-length scholarly analyses as well as a book dedicated to supplying Latin-to-English translations for the dozens (hundreds?) of Latin phrases as well an explanation of the philosophical and literary theories that Eco introduces. (The product description to The Key to The Name of the Rose: Including Translations of All Non-English Passages (Ann Arbor Paperbacks) promises: "an approachable, informative guide to the book and its setting--the middle ages. The Key includes an introduction to the book, the middle ages, Umberto Eco, and philosophical and literary theories; a useful chronology; and reference notes to historical people and events.").
The book has also generated many conflicting interpretations and evaluations of its merit. Eco himself felt compelled to write a Postscript several years after the book's publication. The postscript is helpful in figuring out what Eco was `really' up to. Eco describes a novel as "a machine for generating interpretations." The book's popular success so surprised Eco that he ponders "why the book was being read by people who surely could not like such `cultivated' books." (He concluded that the unsophisticated Adso made readers feel it was OK to not fully comprehend the book.). The Postscript is now included in many versions of the book and I recommend it. The Everyman version does not appear to have the postscript, but this older version does: The Name of the Rose.
Eco clearly enjoys parading his learning - and there is little doubt he is an extraordinarily learned man. What is one to make of his casual use of the most obscure words? (I sometimes suspected he was making up words.) Is he trying to make most us feel stupid? Or is he writing for a very select audience? Or is he urging us to extend our grasp? He explains in the Postscript that wanted readers to become fully immersed in the medieval world, but once past that initiation to become his "prey, or rather the prey of the text". An author who views his readers as prey is just a little weird.
Eco expended great effort studying medieval history and transcripts and the effort shows in most respects, but it was disconcerting to learn that he felt justified in having William spout "disguised quotations" from Wittgenstein (who lived some 450 years after the events of this book) because such things were what William *should* have said. Such intentionally misleading writing violates an implied pact between author and reader. However, I do not wish to make too much of what I perceive as a transgression. The book should be read, pondered, and re-read - or it should be chucked in the trash can in frustration over the umpteenth foreign language or otherwise impenetrable word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or page. Both reactions are understandable. I suggest reading it first.
Book Review: A worthwhile read
Summary: 4 Stars
Not the easiest read, but worth the effort. Brilliant story that takes place during the Inquisition of the 14th century. The power of the church (Catholic) is evidenced by the great lengths it takes to withhold knowledge that is reserved for only a few. Very believable story. The author does a wonderful job of placing you in this time period. Book Review: Good, but rambles too much on factional disputes....
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought this because of the consistent references in other book reviews which referred to this book as a significant standard in historical mystery novels. It is pretty long, and I became tired of the constant ramblings about who should be pope/king, and arguments between various, obscure (to me), Catholic factions. Once I began to skip over all these asides, I enjoyed the actual parts about the murder mysteries and the main characters' work toward solving them.Book Review: This book is intellectually dishonest
Summary: 1 Stars
I've read these other Amazon reviews and I'm a little disappointed that apparently no one here has understood the book. What people haven't realized is that Eco is simply making fun of them and of their ignorance about philosophy. He is giving the reader the impression that he's telling him/her something about medieval intellectual debates. In fact, he is, to a very large extent, making these debates up.
His approach is quite ingenious, but you are not going to appreciate it if you are not familiar with medieval philosophy AND with modern analytical philosophy, and Eco is not really giving you any clue that he's making things up about medieval philosophy. What Eco does is to implement modern ideas from 20th century analytical philosophy into medieval terminology. So for example he is attributing Wittgenstein's ideas about 'family resemblances' to William of Ockham.
To many readers, this book is giving a false impression that they are learning something about the late medieval period when in fact this book is a PARODY. Like any parody, you are required to have some prior knowledge in order to be able to get the joke. But, it seems to me, that, given the obscure subject, it was predictable that many people would not get the joke and would take the 'debates' described in the book at face value. Nonetheless, Eco is happy to leave all these readers in the dark and just have a laugh on them in private. I find this attitude obnoxious. (To be fair, there is one place in the book in which Eco clearly does wink at the reader: at one point one of the monks has an apocalyptic vision which clearly describes a nuclear war; this should have made more readers wonder about the extent to which the entire novel, and not just that particular scene, is built by means of implementing modern themes in a medieval framework, but apparently most readers have failed to get it.)
Moreover, for such a pretentious book, it does not live up to the existing literary standard. I often got the impression that Eco is just an amateur writer trying to copy Borges or Saramago or even Marquez. For example the endless (pages long) enumerations, while definitely funny, do not fit into the text organically, but seem to be inserted around the book at random. Also, when it comes to creating characters, Eco is doing a really bad job. The characters in The Name of the Rose are cartoonish at best. While this might be a feature rather than a bug (e.g. it works pretty well in Foucault's Pendulum), this is not the case here. In this book it is pretty clear that the characters are poorly developed because Eco is simply UNABLE to create credible or somewhat in-depth psychologies.
My advice is not to read this book unless you familiarize yourself with medieval and modern analytical philosophy FIRST. I would recommand instead two other books by Eco, Baudolino and Foucault's Pendulum, which are more intellectually honest, in that the parody is made more clear, and are written with much more skill (The Name of the Rose is Eco's first book so perhaps it may be excused for some of its literary shortcomings).
Book Review: Meh
Summary: 3 Stars
Reviewers rave about Eco's verbose writing style but I honestly found his pages and pages of description to be superfluous filler that really took away from the story. The author would often spend so many pages describing a room the main characters walked into that I would then need to look back and see why the characters entered the room in the first place.
The story itself was relatively mediocre in my opinion; or at least it ended up being mediocre. I found my myself unable to put the book down as I anxiously pushed on to unravel the mystery and see William apprehend the culprits but the ending was an utter disappointment. That the killing would revolve around an old man hiding a book of laughter was just stupid.
Those that find the back cover interesting would be best off reading Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series. Umberto Eco is undoubtedly a first rate scholar but Peters just tells a better story.