Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1983)

This book is an interesting peek into Umberto Eco's thoughts about his novel The Name of the Rose. If you've read the novel, if you are a fiction writer, or if you're into literary theory, you should probably pick up this book.

The book answers my question about why in the name of sanity Eco stops the action repeatedly to insert things like a long description of a tympanum (it's something a medieval writer would have done). He also explains why the book has such a slow, difficult beginning (he intentionally ignored the advice of friends and his editor to test your patience before letting you into the story).

If you write genre fiction and understand that he believes it is inferior to literary fiction, you will be amused to see that his writing process sounds exactly like what you do to write your stories. My favorite example is that he did a year of world-building and invented characters he doesn't put into the novel, but he needed to know who they were in order to proceed. Sound familiar? Oh, and it finishes up with an unintentional writing prompt: the only mystery plot that remains unwritten is the book where the reader is the murderer. Something about the idea just makes you want to try it. :-)

If you're into literary theory, you get a bit of that too as he talks about his literary theories, reassesses some of his opinions from the early 1960s and discusses what constitutes postmodernism.

It's a very quick read with a ton of thought provoking ideas packed between its covers. Definitely worth a try! ( )

This book is an interesting peek into Umberto Eco's thoughts about his novel The Name of the Rose. If you've read the novel, if you are a fiction writer, or if you're into literary theory, you should probably pick up this book.

The book answers my question about why in the name of sanity Eco stops the action repeatedly to insert things like a long description of a tympanum (it's something a medieval writer would have done). He also explains why the book has such a slow, difficult beginning (he intentionally ignored the advice of friends and his editor to test your patience before letting you into the story).

If you write genre fiction and understand that he believes it is inferior to literary fiction, you will be amused to see that his writing process sounds exactly like what you do to write your stories. My favorite example is that he did a year of world-building and invented characters he doesn't put into the novel, but he needed to know who they were in order to proceed. Sound familiar? Oh, and it finishes up with an unintentional writing prompt: the only mystery plot that remains unwritten is the book where the reader is the murderer. Something about the idea just makes you want to try it. :-)

If you're into literary theory, you get a bit of that too as he talks about his literary theories, reassesses some of his opinions from the early 1960s and discusses what constitutes postmodernism.

It's a very quick read with a ton of thought provoking ideas packed between its covers. Definitely worth a try! ( )

My first book of 2009 (the first I've finished, anyway) is actually a re-read: Umberto Eco's Postscript to 'The Name of the Rose' (English translation by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984). In a series of short essays, Eco muses about authorship and model readers, the writing process, the inspirations for The Name of the Rose, and other such things. It is a revealing glimpse at the genesis of the great novel (one of my favorites) and at its creation and subsequent reception.

Eco's pithy comments about the interference of authors with their work are instructive: "Titles must muddle the reader's ideas, not regiment them" (p. 3); "The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text" (p. 7). His admission that a much-commented upon exchange in the novel was inadvertent, with a William of Baskerville line inserted during the galley stage that creates a certain (fortuitous?) ambiguity in the text was interesting to learn, as was the ultimate cause for his writing the novel: "I felt like poisoning a monk" (p. 13). Since I'm a sucker for such things, I also enjoyed reading Eco's account of the research he did to "construct the world" of his medieval abbey (both in terms of its physical description, its chronology, and the voices he used to narrate the story), and his exposition of why he chose the detective story as the model plot for his tale (although, he admits, "this is a mystery where little is discovered and the detective is defeated").

The book ends with a pair of essays on post-modernism, which are clear enough even for those of us who tend to shy away from theoretical gobbledegook. Eco's wry wit and supreme self-confidence are on full display here (as in all of his works), so if you enjoy those, I suspect you'll be intrigued by the Postscript.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/01/book-review-postscript-to-name-of-rose.h... ( )

Ostensibly a short essay about the writing of Eco's most famous novel, this is the best exploration of postmodernism, the postmodern moment, and postmodern literature that I have ever read. Here Eco the brilliant fiction writer and Eco the equally brilliant philosopher and semiotician are present in equal partts, and they engage and explore each other in a way which is as lyrical as it is insightful. The real topic is nothing short of our culture and history as postmoderns, and Eco lives up to the ambitious subject in a way very few authors could. ( )

Very short little book about his writing of The Name of the Rose. I liked how he described his inspiration for writing the novel as, "I wanted to poison a monk."

Some intriguing insights, such as how he ended up deciding to write about the specific time and place he did, which could serve as a guide to writing intelligent fiction. ( )