Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose

Published: 1990

To start off with: YES, I AM AWARE THERE IS A FILM VERSION OF THIS BOOK! ^^

You wouldn't believe how many people asked me if I knew of the film with Sean Connery while I was reading the novel - either because they loved it that much or because they wanted to spare me the supposed agony of reading the book. It got to be quite funny, actually - and not only because the film was probably a huge part of my motivation for picking up the novel in the first place. Apparently, Eco has quite the reputation for being an unreadable author, especially for his book Foucault's Pendulum.

Luckily, however, I had at least three big motivators for picking up this novel and getting to the end of it: 1) the magnificent film, 2) the lovely teacher-student bond, 3) the truly great lecture on the postmodern elements of the book by Albert Meier.

As a result, I think I got about half-way through the novel, before I began to feel the strain of ploughing through all the descriptions - and then it wasn't too difficult to keep going, since the plot had already begun unravelling. But speaking of plot ...

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Content

Published in 1990, The Name of the Rose is both a postmodern novel as well as a historical murder mystery, set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327. The content consists of two main plotlines: on the one hand it deals with the historical tensions between the Catholic Church and the Franciscans centring on the poverty of Christ and on the other hand it is concerned with the solving of a series of murders committed at the monastery. Located at the centre of these two plotlines are William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk - two monks, teacher and student, tasked both with resolving the conflict between the Church and the Franciscans as well as solving the murder mystery. And if the achievement of these two goals already seems difficult from the beginning, William and Adso's situation gets even more desparate once the Inquisition decides to join in their efforts of rooting out "evil" in the monastery ....

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Review

1) Readability
 

aka "So is this book unreadable?"   

If you ask me - no. Although the more nuanced answer would probably be: "It depends." I can certainly see why some readers might give up on the novel. Eco's reputation among readers of being difficult to read certainly seems earned. Based on my experience with The Name of the Rose, this boils down to a number of factors: on the one hand, Eco is both wordy as well as extremely precise regarding his language. This might seem like a paradox, but what it comes down to is that he enjoys writing extremely long passages about seemingly insignificant matters while at the same time being careful about using the exactly right terminology in his descriptions - I would really hate to be his translator ^^. The best example for this style is probably the infamous description of the monastery's church portal, found in the early chapters of the novel, which takes up seven pages of the narrative - I'm not kidding. Eco seemingly does not let a dent in the wood go unmentioned:

And around [the other figurines on the portal], mingled with them, above their heads and below their feet, more faces and more limbs: a man and a woman clutching each other by the hair, two asps sucking the eyes of one of the damned, a grinning man whose hooked hands parted the maw of a hydra, and all the animals of Satan's bestiary, assembled in a consistory and set as guard and crown of the throne that faced them, singing its glory in their defeat, fauns, beings of double sex, brutes with six-fingered hands, sirens, hippocentaurs, gorgons, harpies, incubi, dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynophales who darted fire from their nostrils, crocodiles, polycaudate, hairy serpents, salamanders, horned vipers, tortoises, snakes, two-headed creatures whose backs were armed with teeth, hyenas, otters, crows, hydrophora with sawtooth horns, frogs, gryphons, monkeys, dog-heads, leucrota, manticores, vultures, paranders, weasels, fraons, hoopoes, owls, basilisks, hypnales, presters, spectafici, scorpions, saurians, whales, scitales, amphisbenae, iaculi, dipsases, green lizards, pilot fish, ocotopi, morays, and sea turtles. The whole population of the nether world seemed to have gathered to act as vestibule, dark forest, desperate wasteland of exclusion, at the apparition of the Seated One in the tympanum, at this face promising and threatening, they, the defeated of Armageddon, facing Him who will come at last to separate the quick from the dead.

- Eco, The Name of the Rose p. 44

It won't surprise you that passages like that were difficult to plough through read. Not only because I'm lazy and I actually don't want to imagine objects that clearly, but also because I have no clue what half the words are supposed to mean. (Like, what in the world is an iaculi? ^^) Of course, the precision of the description is not without purpose: as far as I could find out, Eco based it on the portal of Moissac Abbey in southern France and he wanted to make sure that his words matched the real-world version as closely as possible.

The tympanum of Saint-Pierre de Moissac Abbey

Portal in full-view

Moving on from the novel's language, another factor which contributes to the book's complexity is that Eco obviously knows his church history, and he lets it show. Numerous chapters are spent detailing various conflicts and crises of faith within the history of the Catholic Church - and he spends pages upon pages letting characters argue about various church doctrines and the meaning of Bible passages. I won't say that these detailed accounts are pointless - each and every one of them serves a function, be it the creation of a more fully-formed fictional universe, the advancement of William's character, the development of the murderer's motive or providing context to the Franciscan's dilemma with the Pope. As a reader, however, who is not that well-versed in ecclesiastical history, these accounts quickly become confusing and, yes, boring to read, which is why I can certainly see people abandoning the book.

So why do I still think that this book was worth reading? Well ...

2) The Relationships

Or rather: THE relationship. And I don't mean Adso and his girlfriend ^^. As I already explained above, I was really into the teacher-student/adoptive-father-son relationship between William and Adso. The protectiveness William felt for Adso was really endearing, as was the admiration on Adso's part for his teacher. Seeing as the focus of the plot lay on so many other issues, the actual amount of time that was spent on the development of their bond was comparatively little - but this is where Eco's precision really shines. In just a few short passages he manages to give his readers a sense of their affection for one another - as when William worries for his student's physical well-being or Adso is concerned about his master's fate during their confrontation with the Inquisition. Even if those moments were only few and far between, they were one of the biggest motivators for me to keep reading.

Visual cuteness

3) The Humor

It's surprising, but there is actually a fair amount of humor in the novel, if you look closely. I only began to notice this when I started reviewing the book chapter by chapter and my notes got fairly ridiculous at times:

So, by humor I obviously don't mean belly-shaking laughter - but it's funny enough if you pay attention and find the absurdity in some of the behaviour and attitudes ;).

4) The Murder Mystery

Arguably, if the murder mystery wasn't good, you could probably bin the whole book, since it's such a central part. Thankfully, however, it is ;). I imagine it's even more exciting when you haven't been spoiled by the film - but even so, the unravelling of the whodunnit part of the novel is clever and exciting. From finding out the murderer, to disovering his motive, to reading about the killing method - the resolution is both satisfying as well as surprising, seeing as our detectives are not exactly bang on the money with their deductions and there are discoveries to be made until the last few pages. Additionally, Eco adds to the suspense at the end by endangering both Adso's and William's lives, thus raising the stakes impossibly high.

(On a side note, notice that the male pronoun I used for the murderer in the paragraph above is sadly not spoiler-y at all, seeing as there are a whole lot of dudes running around in this story - and only one female character, who remains unnamed to top it off. Speaking as a female reader: not cool, Mr. Eco.)

5) Intertextuality

I know - big word ^^. What it boils down to is that within the novel it's possible to find loads of references to other fictional works, provided you pay close attention and you've read the right books. (Basically, Eco allows his readers to do a bit of detective work themselves, if they feel so inclined.) For instance, the characters of William and Adso are references to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson - arguably the two most famous fictional detectives. The clue for this reference is hidden in William's full name, William of Baskerville, seeing as it clearly references Sherlock Holmes' most famous adventure The Hound of the Baskervilles. But of course this is not the only fictional work that is referenced, since there are other clues, pointing to various other novels, hidden all over the place. 

For an avid reader like me, trying to discover all the hidden meanings was quite an enjoyable challenge - but if you're not into that, don't worry! It doesn't take away from the novel, if you really can't be bothered with this kind of stuff.

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Final Verdict

So, yeah, while I will admit that some of the chapters were close to impossible to get through due to Eco's writing style, I still enjoyed this book immensely for the mystery, the characters and all the things it taught me about life in a monastery, church history and also architecture. Just to give you a taste of what I learned through the novel and the research I did as a result of reading it:

- At one point in medieval medieval history there were multiple Popes, largely due to worldly power struggles.

- Life in a monastery could really suck, since you may have been obliged to get up at 02:00 a.m. for prayers. Every. Frickin. Day.

- A monk's clothing typically consisted of a habit, a scapular and a cincture.

- The unknown areas on maps used to be indicated by the phrase "Hic sunt dracones" or "Hic sunt leones" (= Here be dragons / lions).

- Churches, fundamentally, all look the same. (Alright, that's not what I learned ^^. Rather, I learned the terminology to describe the architecture of churches - which is rather neat!)

Finally, to get back to the film vs book issue from the beginning: yes, the film is probably more enjoyable. But that doesn't mean that reading the book can't be a hell of a ride too. And for me it was ;).

Image credits

1) Cover
https://schoolworkhelper.net/umberto-ecos-the-name-of-the-rose-comedy-carnivalesque/

2) Tympanum
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abadia_de_Saint-Pierre_de_Moissac_-_Portalada_sud.JPG

3) Portal
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abadia_de_Saint-Pierre_de_Moissac_-_Portalada_Sud_de_Moissac.JPG

4) Adso & William
http://thorsday-de-invierno.tumblr.com/post/132867577274/adso-of-melk-christian-slater-and-william-of