Reviews

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

lordsuggs's review against another edition

challenging mysterious slow-paced

3.0

savaging's review against another edition

3.0

I knew that Eco (and his editors) don't have a good tedium-monitor, but for some reason I thought that a book explicitly focused on Catholocism would direct its long ramblings into good old perverse maltheism, in the style of the character Gragnola in Eco's book [b:The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana|10503|The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana|Umberto Eco|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403713678s/10503.jpg|1797159]. (Gragnola's the freedom fighter who sighs: "I believe that God does, unfortunately, exist. It’s just that he’s a fascist"). I could read ramblings like that all day.

But 500 pages and all I got was some vague secular-humanist irreligion. The murder-mystery genre form worked on me, making my brain a greedy little creature. Fortunately, Eco doesn't allow that genre to make things too tidy -- it's a fairly melancholy and brutal world in the end, with many signs presaging nothing.

Since Eco was so bad at writing about women-and-romance in Mysterious Flame, I thought it was a good sign this book takes place in a womanless monastery. But unfortunately, the nameless, mute, gorgeous sex-girl crops up anyway.

Here's a good line, from an old pious monk:

“if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation,’ then we would have no weapons to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breathe where they list!”

aureuslibrary's review against another edition

adventurous emotional informative mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

brenofipaes's review against another edition

mysterious reflective slow-paced

2.75

stilljep's review against another edition

challenging informative mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

danielkallin04's review against another edition

5.0

Eco makes a perfect murder-mystery page turner which just so happens to be an exploration into semiotics and 14th-century Christian factionalism, is only slightly dense, filled with untranslated Latin passages, and yet incredibly gripping. There's nothing more fascinating than sin, hiding and banning something only makes it more enticing. Eco is a master.

jrmarr's review against another edition

3.0

This is a dense book and a little hard to get through. While I found that plot interesting, the style of writing meant that there were often a lot of philosophical and theological discussions to wade through. Glad I read it but it won't be on my reread list.

annashiv's review against another edition

4.0

Definitely a classic.

I listened to the audiobook, which was extremely well done and immersive, however, maybe only listen to it if you are experienced listening to audiobooks. I had a hard time keeping characters straight and their relationships to each other, which is especially important in mysteries. Still, it didn't take too much away from the story. I could still understand the gist. I definitely think I needed the audiobook to get through it. There were some long sermons.

It's definitely not for everyone, but it's clever and charming and unique.

ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

challenging dark funny informative mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“You have spoken to me of a strange story, an incredible story. About a banned book that has caused a chain of murders, about someone who knows what only I should know... Tales, meaningless accusations. Speak of it, if you wish: no one will believe you.”

TITLE—The Name of the Rose

AUTHOR—Umberto Eco

TRANSLATOR—William Weaver

PUBLISHED—orig. 1980 (trans. 1983)

PUBLISHER—orig. Bompiani—Italy (trans. Harcourt—US)

GENRE—literary fiction—(post-)modern classic, satirical gothic novel, medieval murder mystery

SETTING—a monastery in medieval (14th c.) northern Italy

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—labyrinthine library, murder mystery, detective & his sort of “student sidekick” MC duo, monk scribes & monastery scriptoria, the philosophy & theology of humor, banned books & book burning, lust & laughter, medieval Christian iconography, Catholic mythology, secrets & forbidden knowledge, cryptography & symbolism, books & ancient manuscripts, readers, the spirituality of music, sects, dreams & visions, heretics & heresy, Inquisitors & the Inquisition, classism & vehicles of class politics/oppression

“…at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land.”

Summary:

The Kunderian title for this book would be “On Lust & Laughter.” The Holmesian title for this book would be “A Study in Semiotics.” The Gothic title for this book would be “The Seventh Trumpet.” As it is, “The Name of the Rose” is the book’s post-modernist title. (I hope this will do in place of a true summary, which, for this book, would be impossible to give accurately enough.)

My thoughts:

This was my third time reading this book & reading it a) on audiobook & b) in community with the Archaeo Bookclub group has officially elevated this book to my all-time favorites shelf. This book literally has all of my favorite things:

1) It’s hugely satirical with a lot of humor & subtle, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, observations, & asides, as well as tons of subversions of gothic, murder mystery, & theological themes.

2) The explorations of art history, iconography, & christian symbolism along with the deeper philosophical rumination & theological tangents are all so fascinating & the best part about them is that it’s almost impossible to tell when they’re being engaged in with sincerity or facetiousness.

3) All of the characters are vividly rendered, original, & complex. Some of them are sympathetic, some of them utterly detestable, & all of them are flawed in the most human, tragic, & believable ways.

4) The plot is as labyrinthine as the library around which the story revolves to the point where it took me three readings before I finally feel like I “got it.”

5) The booksss. All the discussion & descriptions around books, ancient manuscripts, libraries, scriptoria, illumination, ancient literature, acquisitions & collections in the medieval era, bookcraft, knowledge & reading is truly phenomenal. 😚👌🏻

I look forward to many more rereadings of this book!

“The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them.”

I would recommend this book to readers who aren’t adverse to “not getting it” on your first reading & enjoy a good reread just as much if not more than a first-time read. Also to readers who enjoy lengthy tangents, digressions, & philosophical discussions in their literature… This book is best read with great fortitude! Oh & on the audiobook version (narrators: Sean Barrett, Neville Jason, Nicholas Rowe). Cannot emphasize my recommendation of that performance enough, tbh. It’s *phenomenal.*

Final note: I also finally watched the 1986 film version with Sean Connery & they did an *incredible* job with that adaptation. I was super impressed. The ending was absolutely perfect—especially the couple of parts they changed & the last line they picked to end the movie on. Just really really good all around.

“For it is a tale of books, not of everyday worries, and reading it can lead us to recite, with à Kempis, the great imitator: ‘In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.’” (Translation: ‘I looked for rest in everything & found it nowhere but in the corner with a book.’)

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

CW // implied rape / sexual assault, inquisition torture & interrogation, animal death, biblioteka ekpyrosis (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: Fall

Music pairing: your favorite Lady Mass—I prefer ‘Scottish Lady Mass,’ by Red Byrd, Yorvox

Further Reading—

• Sherlock Holmes
• Hercule Poirot
• more Umberto Eco (THE NAME OF THE ROSE was his first novel)
• THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO by Horace Walpole
• THE MONK by Matthew Lewis—TBR
• Alberto Manguel
• “The Library of Babel,” “Death and the Compass,” & “The Secret Miracle,” by Jorge Luis Borges—TBR
• “The Eye of Allah,” by Rudyard Kipling—TBR
• Bernard Cornwell—who has some of my favorite medieval era worldbuilding; his Saxon Chronicles are also narrated from the POV of an elderly monk character reflecting back on his life
• “The Harlem Ghetto,” by James Baldwin

Favorite Quotes—

“There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (“en me retraçant ces détails, j’en suis à me demander s’ils sont réels, ou bien si je les ai rêvés”). As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.”

“But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.”

“…and I do not say this because we can determine the divine nature but precisely because we cannot set any limit to it.”

“Such is the power of the truth that, like good, it is its own propagator.”

“If a shepherd errs, he must be isolated from other shepherds, but woe unto us if the sheep begin to distrust shepherds.”

“Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God.”

“…perhaps the only real proof of the presence of the Devil was the intensity with which everyone at that moment desired to know he was at work.”

“Monasterium sine libris,” the abbot recited, pensively, “est sicut civitas sine opibus, castrum sine numeris, coquina sine suppellectili, mensa sine cibis, hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis…”

• Translation: “A monastery without books is like a city without wealth, a castle without its defenders, a kitchen without appliances, a table without food, a garden without herbs, a meadow without flowers, a tree without leaves.”

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed. And by divine plan, too, there exist also books by wizards, the cabalas of the Jews, the fables of pagan poets, the lies of the infidels. It was the firm and holy conviction of those who founded the abbey and sustained it over the centuries that even in books of falsehood, to the eyes of the sage reader, a pale reflection of the divine wisdom can shine.”

“For what I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.”

“Don’t trust renewals of the human race when curias and courts speak of them.”

“Joining a heretical group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair. You may burn a cardinal’s house because you want to perfect the life of the clergy, but also because you believe that the hell he preaches does not exist. It is always done because on earth there does exist a hell, where lives the flock whose shepherds we no longer are.”

“A holy war is nevertheless a war.”

“For this reason perhaps there should not be holy wars.”

“As I lay on my pallet, I concluded that my father should not have sent me out into the world, which was more complicated than I had thought. I was learning too many things.”

“…the first rule in deciphering a message is to guess what it means.”

“William examined the cloth, then said, ‘Now everything is clear.’

‘Where is Berengar?’ they asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered.”

“Learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation…

 “Is not a book like that, in fact? Its pages crumble, its ink and gold turn dull, if too many hands touch it. I saw Pacificus of Tivoli, leafing through an ancient volume whose pages had become stuck together because of the humidity. He moistened his thumb and forefinger with his tongue to leaf through his book, and at every touch of his saliva those pages lost vigor; opening them meant folding them, exposing them to the harsh action of air and dust, which would erode the subtle wrinkles of the parchment, and would produce mildew where the saliva had softened but also weakened the corner of the page. As an excess of sweetness makes the warrior flaccid and inept, this excess of possessive and curious love would make the book vulnerable to the disease destined to kill…”

• on knowledge-hoarding & gate-keeping; conflation of the non-material with the material

“…but Salvatore’s parents and grandparents remembered the same story in the past as well, so they came to the conclusion that the world was always about to end.”

“Often during our journey I heard William mention “the simple,” a term by which some of his brothers denoted not only the populace but, at the same time, the unlearned… unquestionably Salvatore was simple.

 “He was simple, but he was not a fool. He yearned for a different world, which, when he fled from his family’s house… Driven by such a hope, as if refusing to recognize this world as a vale of tears where (as they taught me) even injustice is foreordained by Providence to maintain the balance of things, whose design often eludes us…”

 “At times he seemed to me one of those cripples of Touraine who, as the story goes, took flight at the approach of the miraculous corpse of Saint Martin, for they feared the saint would restore the use of their limbs by a miracle and thus deprive them of their source of income, and the saint mercilessly saved them before they reached the border.

 “…he understood that the poor and vagabond life he led should be taken, not as a grim necessity, but as a joyous act of dedication, and he joined penitential sects and groups whose names he could not pronounce properly and whose doctrine he defined in highly unlikely terms.

 “There, I believe, he learned that smattering of Latin he spoke, mixing it with the speech of all the places where he had been as a poor homeless wanderer, and of all the vagabond companions he had encountered, from the mercenaries of my lands to the Bogomils of Dalmatia…. At this point they would no longer heed reason or justice, but only power and their own caprice. Gathered together and finally free, with a dim hope of promised lands, they were as if drunk…

 “The simple cannot choose their personal heresy, Adso; they cling to the man preaching in their land, who passes through their village or stops in their square. This is what their enemies exploit…

 “I think the mistake is to believe that the heresy comes first, and then the simple folk who join it (and damn themselves for it). Actually, first comes the condition of being simple, then the heresy… And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out…

 “The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body… To recover the outcasts he had to act within the church, to act within the church he had to obtain the recognition of his rule, from which an order would emerge, and this order, as it emerged, would recompose the image of a circle, at whose margin the outcasts remain… Acknowledging the outcasts meant reducing their own privileges, so the outcasts who were acknowledged as outcasts had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, maddened by their exclusion, they were not interested in any doctrine.

 “This is the illusion of heresy. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only to keep the leper as he is. …that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong… the most we can do is look more closely.”

• a very long-winded, poetic way of saying that the heretic’s only crime is that of being poor &/or an outcast

“I was already beginning to understand some of the phenomena I was hearing discussed, and I saw that it is one thing for a crowd, in an almost ecstatic frenzy, mistaking the laws of the Devil for those of the Lord, to commit a massacre, but it is another thing for an individual to commit a crime in cold blood, with calculation, in silence.”

“Because from their fathers they have heard stories of other reformers, and legends of more or less perfect communities, and they believe this is that and that is this.”

“Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”

“I looked straight at the condemned man’s face… And I saw the face of a man looking at something that is not of this earth, as I had sometimes seen on statues of saints in ecstatic vision. And I understood that, madman or seer as he might be, he knowingly wanted to die because he believed that in dying he would defeat his enemy, whoever it was. And I understood that his example would lead others to death. And I remain amazed by the possessors of such steadfastness only because I do not know, even today, whether what prevails in them is a proud love of the truth they believe, which leads them to death, or a proud desire for death, which leads them to proclaim their truth, whatever it may be. And I am overwhelmed with admiration and fear.”

“…who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, terribilis ut castorum acies ordinata… O love, daughter of delights, a king is held captive in your tresses… behold thou art fair, my beloved, behold thou art fair; thine eyes are as doves (I said), and let me see thy face, let me hear thy voice, for thy voice is harmonious and thy face enchanting, thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck, thy lips drop as the honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue, the smell of thy breath is of apples, thy two breasts are clusters of grapes, thy palate a heady wine that goes straight to my love and flows over my lips and teeth… A fountain sealed, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, myrrh and aloes, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Who was she, who was she who rose like the dawn, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?”

“There is a mysterious wisdom by which phenomena among themselves disparate can be called by analogous names, just as divine things can be designated by terrestrial terms, and through equivocal symbols God can be called lion or leopard; and death can be called sword; joy, flame; flame, death; death, abyss; abyss, perdition; perdition, raving; and raving, passion.”

“How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!”

“The perfect animal among animals, with superior gifts of perception, the dog recognizes its master and is trained to hunt wild animals in the forests, to guard flocks against wolves; it protects the master’s house and his children, and sometimes in its office of defense it is killed. King Garamant, who had been taken away to prison by his enemies, was brought back to his homeland by a pack of two hundred dogs who made their way past the enemy troops; the dog of Jason Licius, after its master’s death, persisted in refusing food until it died of starvation; and the dog of King Lysimachus threw himself on his master’s funeral pyre, to die with him. The dog has the power to heal wounds by licking them with his tongue, and the tongue of his puppies can heal intestinal lesions. By nature he is accustomed to making second use of the same food, after vomiting it. His sobriety is the symbol of perfection of spirit, as the thaumaturgical power of his tongue is the symbol of the purification of sins through confession and penance. But the dog’s returning to his vomit is also a sign that, after confession, we return to the same sins as before, and this moral was very useful to me that morning to admonish my heart, as I admired the wonders of nature.”

“‘Perhaps. I’ll have to read other books.’

 “‘Why? To know what one book says you must read others?’

 “‘At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem…’

 “Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

““But why have they also put a book with the unicorn among the falsehoods?’

 “‘…many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.’

 “‘What a disappointment,’ I said. ‘I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood?’

 “‘Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind… The unicorn, as these books speak of him, embodies a moral truth, or allegorical, or analogical, but one that remains true, as the idea that chastity is a noble virtue remains true. But as for the literal truth that sustains the other three truths, we have yet to see what original experience gave birth to the letter.’

 “‘Then higher truths can be expressed while the letter is lying?’

 “‘It is not licit to impose confines on divine omnipotence, and if God so willed, unicorns could also exist. But console yourself, they exist in these books, which, if they do not speak of real existence, speak of possible existence.’

 “‘So must we then read books without faith, which is a theological virtue?’

 “‘There are two other theological virtues as well. The hope that the possible is. And charity, toward those who believed in good faith that the possible was….’”

“…because no one on this earth can be forced through torture to follow the precepts of the Gospel: otherwise what would become of that free will on the exercising of which each of us will be judged in the next world? The church can and must warn the heretic that he is abandoning the community of the faithful, but she cannot judge him on earth and force him against his will.”

“Ubertino spoke up. ‘You know you are risking your life?’ 

 “‘So be it,’ Michael answered. ‘Better than risking my soul.’”

“Like all lusts, …it is sterile and has nothing to do with love… True love wants the good of the beloved.”

“This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name.”

“And in that fog of the soul, finding myself as if in a region not of this world, I had a vision, or dream, if you prefer to call it that.”

“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

“Laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil, because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable… When he laughs, as the wine gurgles in his throat, the villein feels he is master, because he has overturned his position with respect to his lord; but this book could teach learned men the clever and, from that moment, illustrious artifices that could legitimatize the reversal… Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God… This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for canceling fear… To the villein who laughs, at that moment, dying does not matter: but then, when the license is past, the liturgy again imposes on him, according to the divine plan, the fear of death… And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts? But on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost. …and at that moment the edge of the known world would become the heart of the Christian empire… 

 “…if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness. But if one day—and no longer as plebeian exception, but as ascesis of the learned, devoted to the indestructible testimony of Scripture—the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, and to seem noble and liberal and no longer mechanical; if one day someone could say (and be heard), ‘I laugh at the Incarnation,’ then we would have no weapons to combat that blasphemy, because it would summon the dark powers of corporal matter, those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breathe where they list!”

“The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. You are the Devil, and like the Devil you live in darkness.”

“The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.”

“…these incomplete pages have accompanied me through all the life that has been left me to live since then; I have often consulted them like an oracle, and I have almost had the impression that what I have written on these pages is a cento, a figured hymn, an immense acrostic that says and repeats nothing but what those fragments have suggested to me, nor do I know whether thus far I have been speaking of them or they have spoken through my mouth.”

“Est ubi gloria nunc Babyloniae? Where are the snows of yesteryear? The earth is dancing the dance of Macabré; at times it seems to me that the Danube is crowded with ships loaded with fools going toward a dark place.”

doora's review against another edition

funny informative mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0