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A review by savaging
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
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:
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!”