Brian's Reviews > The Name of the Rose

“The Name of the Rose” is a horribly pretentious, pedantic, verbose “novel”. And it stinks too!

Under the guise of a medieval mystery Umberto Eco has written a diatribe on philosophical ideas (and not presented all of them accurately) in order to impress upon the reader how very smart he is indeed. Characterization, moments of human reality & truth, and most importantly accessibility to the reader are clearly repulsive ideas to Mr. Eco.

I can sum up the book, which takes place at a monastery in northern Italy in 1327 thus:
-Monks have crazy visions, lots of them and their visions don’t advance the plot one iota.
-Umberto Eco knew Latin, and he wants you to be damn sure to know it.
-The narrator has a vison in which Eco shows off that he knows Bible stories, lots of them, and can throw them into a blender to create some post-apocalyptic nonsense, again to no point in the story. My mommy read Bible stories to me too. I get the references Eco was making. I imagine that would disappoint him. He clearly hates novels that actually involve the reader.
-Eco is actually a very bad version of Dan Brown. Read that sentence again. Yep I said it. The text’s great dénouement is straight out of one of Brown’s novels with the same obvious villain/ religious fanatic that the reader can see coming a mile away. Mr. Brown can’t write, but he is a good storyteller. Eco can’t write (and editing is out of his frame of reference) AND he is a horrid storyteller.
-The arrogant and meandering “Postscript” written by the author (he takes 40 pages to explain to you how great he and his book are) is truly terrible. It will make you detest the writer. As if you will need help after finishing this torture. Did no one ever tell this guy to shut up? Throughout these 40 pages he contradicts himself, and talks down to the reader too many times to count.
Really my biggest frustration with “The Name of the Rose” is that it infrequently presents an interesting idea which if followed up would have made for intriguing reading. Among them, the idea of “books speaking among themselves” and some thoughts on the nature of learning that had much potential. There are nuggets throughout the text that if taken out of context are quite insightful and worthy of thought. But then Eco’s ego gets the better of him and he pontificates and belabors each point he makes. Every time he presents an idea (philosophical, educational, religious or other) he makes the point in 2-3 pages and then goes on to lecture the reader for another 10-20 pages on the same point redundantly. If those redundancies alone had been cut the text would have been 300 pages and significantly less bad.

A member of my book club picked this text, and the way the meeting for this book went clearly demonstrates its flaws. It was not a discussion and an exchange of ideas, but a lecture. When you have a group of educated people and 1 or 2 has to tell the rest of them how valuable a text is…well…I think that says it all right there. Ironically Eco writes in the book “Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts, therefore it is dumb.” Unless you are a book by Mr. Eco of course, then if people don’t read your work because it does not speak to them they are the fools. There are quite a few fans of this text who may believe that whopper. I for one am not biting.