The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Feb
'08
I read a review once that said this book automatically brings your IQ up when you read it. I’m going to agree and disagree with that statement - it implies that other books don’t, which makes me wonder what else the reviewer has been reading, because I’ve felt “very smart” after reading a lot of books this past year. It’s true, however, that the reader is required to think on a certain level of understanding in order to get through this book. The reader has to be able to follow William’s logic both through Adso’s interpretation of it and on an outsider’s unbiased level. Otherwise, theoretically, the reader can’t ever solve the mystery even though it’s been hypothetically solved.
I say it’s been “hypothetically” solved because I don’t think a solution was ever actually made certain. William finds Jorge with the book in the forbidden part of the library and recounts all his steps getting there, but Jorge denies responsibility. Yes, perhaps it’s just a fanatical notion that none of it is his fault just because he thinks it’s divine; however, I didn’t get the sense that anything was set in stone. William was never able to prove that the book in his hands was Aristotle’s Poetics and Jorge could have just as easily been lying that it was in order to protect another more harmful book. Both William and Jorge were driven by a kind of pride - William proud of his deduction skills, Jorge proud of his faith - and pride can be harming and extremely blinding. William approached Jorge with assumptions; he said it himself that none of his clues leading to Jorge were correct. What does this do? It takes away the reliability of the solution and makes one wonder if what was stated really happened. Unfortunately, nothing was able to be solved, as the fires destroyed all the evidence and ended the book.
In any case, throughout the book the reader learns several times and in several different ways that William is possibility’s biggest fan. This, in part, contributes to why the conclusions seem not entirely accurate. He says that one must solve mysteries based on the many possibilities, and he never backs down from that until he makes his assumptions at the end. It seemed odd to me that a man would go throughout the entire 600-page novel thinking of all possibilities and considering each one as a reasonable solution, but then latch on to only two or three of those to reach his conclusions. They merely fell into place; as I mentioned, he even said it was all coincidence. Thus, how could he be sure he was right? How can the reader possibly know if that was the truth?
I only recently started reading mysteries as a genre; I’ve gotten through all the books by one author (John Dunning - excellent) and a few here and there by others. I can’t say that I’m an expert on the genre, but I have a pretty good idea of how the books progress. The Name of the Rose is different from any mystery I’ve ever read, and it isn’t because it’s “smart.” It’s well-researched, yes, and leaving the Latin and other languages within the text for the reader to skim over and ignore adds to the atmosphere, but it’s actually constructed differently. Looking back, now that I know the ending, it seems as though “hints” weren’t dropped; rather, the solution was dropped several times, but it was veiled under characters considered “insane” or “forgetful.” There were also so many other elements introduced which one wouldn’t find in just any old mystery novel - the Inquisition, the politics of the abbey, and Adso’s emotional development. These all became factors somehow; the reader was forced to think of them in relation to the murders, even though they largely had nothing to do with them (except, in passing, the politics, but only by way of heirarchy and power division).
About 3/4 of the way through I started pondering the title of the book and what it might have to do with the rest of it. I thought that the “name of the rose” was going to be the name of the poison that was being used to kill off all the characters. I was really excited for there to be a chapter about the murderer (whom I had not discovered yet) stealing a rose from Severnius, but it never came. I am now begging the question: What does the title have to do with the book? Perhaps it’s something I missed. I looked up the last line of the book, which is in Latin, because it clearly includes the word “rose”: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus and found that it translates directly as: “Yesterday’s rose endures in its name; we hold empty names.” This makes me think of Adso’s experiences and what he’s lost - the girl he fell in love with, William who separated from him and died later, the library in which he spent so much time, the book for which they were searching. He no longer holds the “rose,” if you think of each of these things as a rose; he holds only the “name,” or a description of these things. His book is the only trace left of the events that week, as the fire destroyed everything else.
So, has my IQ gone up a few points just because I’ve read this? I’m not sure I would say that it has. It’s an extremely thought-provoking book, and I haven’t even covered all my ideas in this post. There are a lot of themes crossing through the novel and in some places it seems too wordy and confusing to continue, but there’s always the special “drive” that mystery books need to contain to keep the reader going. Is it suspense? Curiousity? I don’t know, but it’s certainly there, and whatever it is made it very difficult to put the book down. It’s definitely worth a re-read sometime in the far future, at the very least to go back through and resort out the religious threads, but also maybe to figure out more clues to a valid solution.
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If you liked The Name of the Rose, you should definitely check out Foucault’s Pendulum. I think it succeeds in retaining that knowledge-rich feel of Name of the Rose but isn’t nearly as dry. The characters, too, have a bit more life to them.
Mar
'08