It has been said that The Name of the Rose was one of the most purchased, most displayed, and least read bestsellers. This notion expressed a belief that at least more people wanted to be perceived as sophisticated enough to read the book than wanted to make the effort of reading it.

On one level, The Name of the Rose is a decent whodunit set in an isolated northern Italian medieval monastery. William of Baskerville is our Sherlock and Adso, his young assistant, is the unlearned neutral narrator (His neutrality is seemingly due to lack of sufficient understanding to put a sophisticated gloss on his reporting - but he is writing the story decades later.). Upon their arrival, the abbot asks William to investigate the death of one of the monks. As he does so, the bodies pile up, a number of potential suspects and motivations are suggested and then rejected as the suspects themselves become victims. (In that regard, William echoes TV detectives who come to solve one murder, fail to stop several more, but then compensate by solving them all. See, for example, Midsomer Murders - The Early Cases Collection).

Mixed in with the mystery, however, are discursions in semiotics, hermeneutics, biblical analysis, religious debate, literary theory, and medieval history. And what would a medieval mystery be without the inquisition?

The Name of the Rose is a ludicrously difficult book to read if one insists upon understanding everything that one is reading. The book has spawned at least two book-length scholarly analyses as well as a book dedicated to supplying Latin-to-English translations for the dozens (hundreds?) of Latin phrases as well an explanation of the philosophical and literary theories that Eco introduces. (The product description to The Key to The Name of the Rose: Including Translations of All Non-English Passages (Ann Arbor Paperbacks) promises: "an approachable, informative guide to the book and its setting--the middle ages. The Key includes an introduction to the book, the middle ages, Umberto Eco, and philosophical and literary theories; a useful chronology; and reference notes to historical people and events.").

The book has also generated many conflicting interpretations and evaluations of its merit. Eco himself felt compelled to write a Postscript several years after the book's publication. The postscript is helpful in figuring out what Eco was `really' up to. Eco describes a novel as "a machine for generating interpretations." The book's popular success so surprised Eco that he ponders "why the book was being read by people who surely could not like such `cultivated' books." (He concluded that the unsophisticated Adso made readers feel it was OK to not fully comprehend the book.). The Postscript is now included in many versions of the book and I recommend it. The Everyman version does not appear to have the postscript, but this older version does: The Name of the Rose.

Eco clearly enjoys parading his learning - and there is little doubt he is an extraordinarily learned man. What is one to make of his casual use of the most obscure words? (I sometimes suspected he was making up words.) Is he trying to make most us feel stupid? Or is he writing for a very select audience? Or is he urging us to extend our grasp? He explains in the Postscript that wanted readers to become fully immersed in the medieval world, but once past that initiation to become his "prey, or rather the prey of the text". An author who views his readers as prey is just a little weird.

Eco expended great effort studying medieval history and transcripts and the effort shows in most respects, but it was disconcerting to learn that he felt justified in having William spout "disguised quotations" from Wittgenstein (who lived some 450 years after the events of this book) because such things were what William *should* have said. Such intentionally misleading writing violates an implied pact between author and reader. However, I do not wish to make too much of what I perceive as a transgression. The book should be read, pondered, and re-read - or it should be chucked in the trash can in frustration over the umpteenth foreign language or otherwise impenetrable word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or page. Both reactions are understandable. I suggest reading it first. ( )

Umberto Eco was Professor of Semiotics at Bologna University when The Name of The Rose was published in 1980. Semiotics is the study of sign systems, a more arcane and subtle version of the spurious field of symbiology invented by Dan Brown, a would-be Eco. The grandfather of semiotics, the American philosopher Peirce, defined a sign as ‘something that stands to somebody for something else in some respect or capacity’. In other words, a tripartite entity which involves a thing, an observer, and a sign mediating between the two and which is capable of different interpretations: a rose, its various names, and a seeing, scenting self. Eco’s novel is, among other things, an attempt to embody in artistic form the principles and practice of semiotics, and at the same time, to show how important it is for freedom of thought. The interpretation of signs is a key activity and theme of the book, and may be said to operate in two contrasting areas: interpretation from deduction, and interpretation from doctrine...

Read the full review on The Lectern:

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2009/1... ( )

Before I read this, I read somewhere that it is considered the thinking man's Da Vinci Code. I don't know if that's true because I've never read the Da Vinci Code, but it seems like it could be the case. I know this is supposed to be a post modernist masterpiece about relativism and the nature of truth and how books speak to other books. BUT. I just read it for the whodunit, and because I have a history degree and enjoyed all the medieval stuff. SO it's very smart blah blah whatever but it's also very ENTERTAINING, which I (sometimes) find more important. ( )

Once I completed “Foucault’s Pendulum” I knew that I wanted to read more from Umberto Eco. And soon after picking up Mr. Eco’s first novel “In the Name of the Rose” I greedily devoured its contents. While not taking as many digressions as Mr. Eco’s later work, “In the Name of the Rose” does develop many tangents not inclusive but wholly in line with the murderous storyline. What I love most about Mr. Eco’s work is the relative esoteric history lesson one gets when reading, especially the story of Dolcino’s heresy. Hopefully, I’ll be picking up his next novel in the near future. ( )

Not uninteresting but blown way out of proportion. Umberto Eco is not the Messiah, he's a dull microcosmopolitan academic and nothing more. ( )