Brother Adso and Brother William travel to a remote convent in Italy. Brother William is there to work for a reconciliation between the Emperor's faction and the Pope's faction within the Catholic church. But his arrival also causes the abbot to investigate the recent death of a brother of their order. More deaths follow soon, and everything points toward an insider being behind it all. William is determined to find out what's behind all of this, even if it means discovering every secret the abbey possesses.

I read one review that describes this as The Da Vinci Code with brains. Possibly. But that doesn't necessarily make it an easy read. All the long, long, paragraphs, the highly technical religious controversies, and all the passages of Latin (With no footnotes! Why not?).

I almost feel like this was two books in one, one that I enjoyed - the mystery, the relationships, the setting - and then the long, pretentious stuff that's rather boring. I got to where I started skipping the boring stuff so I could get to the action. This edition had an afterword by the author, where he longwindedly defends his style and his writing. Maybe. But I disagreed with him. The stuff he defends as crucial to the book are the things I found myself skipping. ( )

This, in my humble opinion, is Eco's best work. The prose brings medieval monastic existence to life. Great characters and for ECO, a fast moving plotline highlight this work. I personally loved the literary and linguistic references throughout the book. I loved the fact that the Latin was not translated and made you do your own work to pull the full meaning out of the text. Bravo!

Narrated by the 80-year-old Benedictine monk Adso, “The Name of the Rose” relates events that occurred over a one-week period in 1327 when Adso (then an 18-year-old novice) and his master, the English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville, visited an abbey in northern Italy. The action takes place during the controversy over Apostolic poverty that occurred between the Franciscans and Dominicans, and during the course of the story a Papal legation including the inquisitor Bernard Gui arrives to evaluate allegations of heresy. At issue is the poverty of Jesus and whether or not the Church should accumulate wealth. These concerns however are overshadowed by the mysterious death of the monk Adelmo which is followed by 6 sequential murders of monks during the week. William’s time is consumed by an investigation of the mysterious deaths, and a large part of the popularity of this novel is based on the clever unraveling of the mystery that occurs as a result of William’s deductive reasoning and interpretation of symbols. The abbey has an elaborate labyrinthine library with many rooms laid out as regions of the world as it was known at the time with secret passages accessed by hidden mechanisms. A mysterious book it contains holds the answer to at least some of the murders. Ironically, when the mystery is solved, the murders turn out not to be part of a plan patterned on the Apocalypse, as William suspected, but rather a suicide followed by a serious of murders connected with illicit trysts between monks and an elaborate attempt of one monk to suppress information in Aristotle’s book on Comedy (a lost work that suggests laughter is an appropriate response to the mysteries of the universe).

The novel clearly reflects the erudition of its author who is a professor of semiotics and an expert on medieval times. There is a lot of Latin in the book (without translation) which puts the average (Eco would say “unsophisticated”) reader like me at a disadvantage. There are long enumerations of medieval minutiae such as the entire chapter devoted to Adso’s inspection of the fantastic creatures carved on the church’s doors. In the postscript, Eco says the “long didactic passages” were intentional and served to set the pace of the book. His friends and editors advised him to shorten the first 100 pages of the book because this section was “demanding” but he refused, believing “if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace.”

Near the end of the book, William gives Adso some advice about where the real danger (as opposed to the risk of heresy) lies: “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.” I found this argument very compelling.

Finally, don’t ask what the title of the book means. Apparently, Eco wrote the postscript in response to that question, and even after reading the postscript I still don’t understand it. He says he chose the rose as a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left. What? The title is a cliché? I guess I am just one of those “unsophisticated” readers! Read the book yourself and decide if it is worth the effort. ( )

I have heard The Name of the Rose described as 'The Da Vinci Code written by somebody with brains'. The author of this description is not far wrong. While it may have all the elements of a typical Dan Brown novel, The Name of the Rose is infinitely deeper, richer and more thought-provoking. This really is the book that has everything – murder, action, religion, sex, philosophy, suspense, and even a dash of well-placed humour. Though it took me a while to read, it has challenged my reasoning, stretched my mind and extended my vocabulary. (I had to read it with a dictionary to properly understand it!)

The pace will probably infuriate all but the most patient readers at some point or other. Our narrator, Adso, feels that there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis, but I found it difficult to share his passion. The first hundred-and-twenty pages or so are filled with too much description, too many lists and too much discourse for my liking. It was not until I had read nearly a third of the novel that it started to get really interesting - and even then, the 'interesting factor' continued to ebb and flow. Be warned: those who read The Name of the Rose simply as a mystery or thriller novel will be frustrated by the omnipresent philosophy. ("Why yes, Mr Eco, I would love to stop all the excitement for a fraternal debate on the poverty of Christ.") Instead, it should be read as a work of philosophy, where the mystery and thriller elements are simply the icing on the cake.

While the pace may cripple the excitement, however, it gives Eco plenty of time to paint vivid pictures of the abbey in the minds of his readers. The descriptive language in The Name of the Rose is always exceptional, and sometimes breathtaking. (Ironically, its brilliance is probably due in part to Adso's annoying list-making!) There are very few books that manage to capture the world of their story as perfectly as this one does. Truly, Eco is a literary master.

It may be hard to read at times, but for those willing to turn the pages, the experience is well worth the effort. This is one book that I won't easily forget.

This is one of the rare mystery novels out there that manages to be more than just a "whodunit." Mysteries, which come with the ready-made plot arc of crime/investigation/solution, often fail to give the reader much more than that, dressed up with a few different characters or a different setting. In Eco's book we get not only a decently plotted murder mystery , but also a close look at life in a medieval European abbey, plus an examination of the nature of books, of knowledge, of language, and ultimately of humanity. If that sounds like a lot, well, the book weighs in at about five hundred pages, so there's plenty of room for it.

The actual mystery is not anything to write home about, nor does it suffice by itself to keep the reader turning the pages. What makes this book a masterpiece is the way it steeps you in the fascinating world of the medieval monks, and places you inside the heads of people who look at the world so very differently than we do today - but still, by and large, are very much like us. I'm not sure about the accuracy of the details of the larger historical plot, but they fit in with what I do know about the period, and I think Eco generally has a pretty good record on that score.

I thoroughly enjoyed picking up on the subtle (and occasionally unsubtle) references to Sherlock Holmes that Eco makes in describing William of Baskerville's character and behavior. William is a little bit of an anachronism but not overtly; his beliefs and way of thinking are rather modern, but Eco provides sufficient evidence that he arrived at that mindset from available medieval literature and experiences, so we buy it and move on.

If you have no interest in history or theology, and aren't interested in a relatively slow-paced immersion in the historical world and mindset of medieval Catholic monks, you might find this novel too slow or too boring for your tastes. It's definitely not a quick beach-read mystery. On the other hand, if you like historical fiction, this is a gem of that genre; if you want a book that will entertain you while making you think, and which you can't finish in one sitting, this one's for you. Ultimately, the final revelation is less about the identity of the criminal, but the nature of crime, and I'm going to be pondering the theological/philosophical implications of the ending for a few days at least. I fully expect this book to stand up to a re-read in a year or so. ( )