It’s probably been 15 years since I’ve read anything substantial by Umberto Eco. I’m pretty sure I was maybe a sophomore or junior in college the first time I read The Name of the Rose. Now, I find myself in the position of needing to reread it for a work-related event. In the intervening decade and a half, I’ve gotten a lot better at Latin, and I’ve also been exposed to a lot more primary source material concerning theology, philosophy, science, literature, and history of the European Middle Ages, as well as 20th century literary theory.
What do my academic qualifications have to do with this book? I remember reading it the first time and thinking something along the lines of ‘I guess that’s that classic off my list’ but I don’t remember any other impression. Coming back to it, I wonder how I could have understood much of anything at all. I’m still pretty sure I only caught/understood about half of what’s going on beneath the surface story.
This novel is incredibly dense. There’s massive chunks of medieval theological discussion and debate, lots of references to real people and events, but it’s all mixed in with a murder mystery and Eco’s fictional additions which almost fit into the historical. I’m not sure anyone who reads this can really understand it without either one of the “how to read this” books that now exist or multiple PhDs and facility in several languages.
The basic story is simple enough: elderly monk Ado recalls the series of unfortunate events that occurred when he as a young novice monk travels with his master William of Baskerville to an abbey in Italy where William is to serve as a representative and mediator at a historic meeting between two sides of the religious controversy between secular and Church leaders. William’s name should be a give-away as to his general role and method of playing it in the murder mystery, and also by extension Adso’s, but in addition William at various points expresses admiration for William of Ockham and Roger Bacon (both controversial in their days for their scientific ideas). Upon arriving at the abbey which houses a library equivalent to the ancient one of Alexandria, not that I’m foreshadowing or anything, William is informed by the abbot of a mysterious death which must be solved before the various delegations arrive in a few days. A variety of problems of course ensue including multiple suspicious people, more murders, a mysterious manuscript several of the dead have a connection to, a labyrinth, prohibitions about the top floor of the library, etc.
None of this is really the point though. There are pages and pages of descriptions of places, spiritual (or not so spiritual) visions, theological disputation on among other things, did Christ ever laugh and why that even matters. There’s a good bit of Latin (some of it historical, some of it fictional), some references to Greek, a little German, and most of it untranslated. The nature of interpretation and meaning is a key concern, which makes sense for two reasons. First, Eco was interested in linguistics and semiotics (a branch of language theory that deals with meaning), and second, words like ‘symbol’, ‘sign’, and ‘signify’ (and their variations) appear almost constantly throughout the book.
This is definitely one of those books that is worth reading at least once, carefully, but with the understanding that it’s intentionally very academic, and even academics have trouble with understanding some of the more obscure references. Don’t even try to read this if you’re a person who needs to understand everything that occurs in a story. Unless you’re an expert in everything Eco was interested in and a bit more, you don’t stand a chance. It’s still worth the read though. At least once.
