Though labeled a mystery novel, The Name of the Rose is not a book
to pick up for escapist entertainment. It demands your full attention,
and even then parts are likely to be missed or not understood. The
investigation of the mysterious deaths of six monks in a 13th-century
Benedictine abbey in northern Italy is woven into a historical story
about warring factions in medieval Christianity and a philosophical
exposition of the search for truth.
William of Baskerville, a Franciscan priest from Britain, arrives at
the abbey to attend a debate about whether a Franciscan sect’s
preference for poverty is heresy. With him is his assistant, a young
Benedictine novice named Adso who is the novel’s narrator (shades of
Holmes and Watson). They find out that one of the monks recently died
from a supposed suicide. The abbot asks William, a brilliant scholar
and former church inquisitor, to investigate. As more monks die in the
next week, it is clear that a murderer is at work.
Umberto Eco, an Italian scholar, began his career as a professor of
medieval studies and semiotics, an obscure field about how signs make
meaning. William of Baskerville’s search for evidence to identify the
murderer in The Name of the Rose brought
together Eco's academic background and a detective story. Although he
solves the case, William concludes with pessimistic words about the
quest for certainty and meaning. Eco wrote a postscript in which he
says he chose the title "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich
in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left.”
Eco was 48 when The Name of the
Rose, his first novel, was published in 1980. More than 10
million copies have been sold worldwide, and Eco became a literary
sensation. He went on to write four more novels, none of which was more
popular than The Name of the Rose.
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