Postscript to The Name of the Rose

This is a wonderful, engaging little addendum to the novel, and well worth reading in its own right. Eco's writing here is clever and playful, and I think he does a good job of laying out some of the inspirations for The Name of the Rose, connecting it to his broader thoughts about fiction and novels. There are many things I like here, perhaps most of all his forceful criticism of authors who are overeager to explain their novels to readers and insist on a single 'correct' interpretation.

Of course, that's an ironic thing to say in a review of an essay that spends 80 pages commenting on a novel written by the essay's author. Eco deftly--though not entirely successfully--dodges this criticism by distinguishing between a discussion of the show more method by which a novel is constructed and its meaning. He does come off as a bit defensive in a way that suggests that he has not entirely internalized his own criticisms. In making various comments about balancing entertainment with art, about the virtuous historical novel being one that uses fiction to explain the past to the reader, and about postmodernism presenting an ironic reengagement with pre-modernity, Eco seems to be carefully constructing rubrics by which his novel, inevitably, succeeds. One gets the sense of a student grading their own work: "Of course, my essay isn't good just because I wrote it--however..."

I also wish Eco had said a bit more about the theme of comedy, so central to the novel and yet so seemingly at odds with much of it. I don't mean to suggest that I would like Eco to tell me what it all means. But he justifies his choice of the mystery genre, and of focusing on various philosophical ideas from the Middle Ages--why not talk about the importance of comedy?

More than anything, I'm left with two overwhelming impressions. First, I'm amazed this novel ever did as well as it did. The '80s must have been an entirely different literary landscape from our own--I'm reminded of the bizarre breakout success of Gödel, Escher, Bach, a few years earlier. Just what were the boomers getting up to? Second, I'm saddened that Eco passed away before I had a chance to encounter his work. One gets the sense from his writing that he was an eminently good natured, insightful, and open-minded person. I always get the sense, encountering authors who died just a few years earlier, to have missed someone important. But perhaps there are more important ways for them to live on. show less

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" show more (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... show less

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.

Like any good semiotician (read, basically, postmodernist), Umberto Eco tries to tell you something by not really telling you anything, as if being inscrutable were a virtue. At least with Eco, he will sometimes trot out what he's really thinking, and he is witty and entertaining. (Compare by reading Michel Foucault, where inscrutable is raised to a cult, or just a cruel joke.) There are some insights into the novel, and it is well worth the read, either separate, as here, or as a proper postscript in newer editions, usually paperback, of The Name of the Rose.

I cheated and broke from my winter reading list because I wanted to read this with The Name of the Rose still fresh in my mind. So sue me.

While the name might make you think this is a continuation of The Name of the Rose, it's actually a short essay by Eco about the creation of the book/the Middle Ages/detective novels. (Apparently it's included with some editions -- my paperback copy certainly didn't have it.)

Like The Name of the Rose, I'm not sure I got everything in here (I'll probably regret this, but I think there are some parts no one other than scholars of Italian literature is going to get), but it's a fascinating, quick look into a great book.

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.

Un excelente panorama sobre El nombre de la rosa y el proceso creador de Eco. La visión familiar de un joven novelista conjugada con la mirada experta del teórico literario.