Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"

Read: September 5, 2011

Eco's The Name of the Rose has been on my list for several years, but it was always one of those books I wasn't sure I'd ever read because I found its reputation intimidating. I've found, in this past year of unstructured reading, that I swing from opposites. Sometimes I'll crave nonfiction, sometimes fiction; sometimes I'll want to be challenged, and others I want to veg out with a non-thinking books. Usually the latter impulse results in a popular series (Outlander, The Parasol Protectorate, and Song of Ice and Fire for this past year), so I'll intersperse a book in the series with some of the more lofty books. Picking up The Name of the Rose resulted from a more vicious swing towards the lofty (probably from some deeply unsatisfying popular fiction response). Eco's book took me a bit of reading, but it was well worth the effort.
An often dense read, this intellectual book does not shy away from ecumenical, theological, historical, or philosophical digressions. However, the murder mystery propels the plot forward, as does the real-time narration (Adso narrates the book in seven days, marking chapters according to the daily monastic schedule). The chapter descriptions lend an academic feel to the novel and the decision to break chapters by time of day rather than action not only pulls the reader into the world of the abbey, but also makes the reader's progress easy to note. Eco is quite frankly a genius and I sometimes wished I read the book along with one of the companion guides - at the very least to translate the Latin, Greek, and sometimes even German quotations, but also to explain the historical background. With the caveat that this is not a book to be taken lightly, however, I was absolutely enthralled by it. 
I was amused by all of the references to Sherlock Holmes throughout the book. Brother William of Baskerville, Adso's mentor and fortunately a man and not a hound, is quite obviously a reincarnation of Sherlock himself. He employs the careful deduction and rationality he learned from Francis Bacon in England, and in this he is quite modern. I wondered just how anachronistic he is. In the time of Inquisition, relying on evidence and logical reasoning was not very common, and William's lectures about the devil and his supposed actions seemed highly suspect for a supposedly medieval mind. I read it as a kind of "wish fulfillment" historical fiction - wouldn't it be great if we could introduce a modern mind, trained in logic and rationality, into the world of the Inquisition? Be that as it may, I have no problem with wish fulfillment.
The Sean Connery movie adaptation, which I watched as a celebration for finishing the book, is one of those adaptations that make unexpected changes to the plot line that you were not entirely sure was necessary, but at the same time could understand Hollywood's motivations. Absolutely read the book first.