The Name of the Rose - Spoilers

[Trisha]

Hmmm...Not only have I never read this one, but I also have no idea what it is about. The title is familiar though, and I am fairly certain that I have a copy buried on one of my bookshelves. Very curious...

[Rachel]

I took this book out of the library, and will start it when I finish the one I am reading. (I am funny that way, I cannot read more than one book at a time). I would love to take part in the discussion then...

[Katy, Quarterly Long Reads]

This intrigues me too. Found a copy cheap for my Kindle. I do need to finish a couple other books though. I am okay with reading more than one at a time, but I've got seven started.

[Mo]

I'll be starting it after finishing a couple of others, too!

[Cleo]

Do any of you have an edition that translates the Latin?? I have a beginning Latin background and can stumble along but it would sure be nice to have easy access to the translations!

[Trisha]

I got mine from a used book store and it's definitely in English, but I just started it, so I'm not sure if there are Latin terms scattered in it.

[Julie]

Are we talking about the umberto Ecco book? It's super - a great detective story with the twist that it's set in a monastery

[Trisha]

That's what I have, and the blurb on the back sounds fantastic!

[Trisha]

My husband just told me that there is a much older book with the same title, which may explain the Latin confusion. PLEASE make sure that you have the book by Umberto Eco! It was published around 1980 and it's about a mystery that takes place in an abbey in 1327. Sounds a little like "The DaVinci code" if you read the synopsis, with secret symbols, mystery, murder, and.....the Antichrist. Oooooohhh!

[Cleo]

Trisha wrote: "My husband just told me that there is a much older book with the same title, which may explain the Latin confusion. PLEASE make sure that you have the book by Umberto Eco! It was published around..."

Yes, that's the right book. The monks use Latin quite often and if you don't know Latin, it kind of break up the flow.

When I've read other books that intersperse other languages with English, while some editions decide not to include translation, you usually can find one that does. Except for this book ......... I have two different editions and no translations in either. :-P I was just wondering if there is one out there ......???

[Rachel]

I don't understand any Latin but I keep going anyway - although it slows the reading a bit.

[Cleo]

I'm about 1/3 of the way through it (page 146). How is everyone enjoying it so far? Any likes and/or dislikes??? :-)

[Trisha]

I am only about 30 pgs in, so I'm just waiting for the "mystery" to begin.

[Rachel]

I am on page 150 and getting a little bogged down with the internal Church politics. Perhaps I am spoiled by reading modern fast-paced mysteries, but I am hoping that the pace will pick up soon. What do others think?

[Cleo]

Yes, I agree Westbankmama. I prefer to read classics and I'm having trouble following his points. I find he doesn't explain the situations very well when he digresses. I'm also having trouble connecting with any of the characters. So far he doesn't seem to be portraying any monks in a favourable light and again throws in s*xual scandal within the abbey. Yawn! He could at least be a little more original. I'm going to keep going but I'm beginning to wonder if my time wouldn't be better spent on another book. What do the rest of you think?

[Miranda]

I am on page 180 and except for a few chapters, I am really struggling through the novel.

[Cleo]

Lolo, Thanks so much for your review! It was pretty much what I expected but it's nice to know there are some redeeming points in the book. From what I read, I sensed an "agenda" with Eco, that more or less irritated me. The whole "religious" vs. "scientific" thinking (again I have read only 1/3 of the book) smacked of modern opinions and I am really getting tired of modern thought getting applied to ancient times within those times. But it was just Eco pushing my buttons and certainly no reason why others shouldn't attempt to read it. For now though, it's going on my "maybe later" shelf. :-)

[Trisha]

I agree that soooo much of this novel is bogged down in description, Latin, and historical references. I am just waiting for something apocalyptic and Antichrist-ish to happen, but that doesnt sound likely from these reviews :-(

[Mo]

I barely got started this morning, but then I was called in to work! Maybe I'll have some time tonight to at least get through First Day.

[Rachel]

I am 3/4 of the way through the book and feel like throwing in the bookmark! I have had to read two other books at the same time because I just needed a break. I always feel terribly guilty not finishing a book, but this one is very hard (what I am looking for here is other people to tell me that it was badly written and it is ok not to finish!

[Cleo]

Lolo wrote: "Well something apocalyptic will happen but don't think of Armageddon and end of the world.

@Cleo: Without bragging I can say that my knowledge of medieval history and religion is above average an..."

Lolo, Thanks for this information. I wanted to make sure I'm giving Eco a fair chance. What you said (with more knowledge than I have) I felt. He obviously is trying to make certain points and include certain higher level concepts within the plot but I think he sacrificed his characters and the overall feel of that century to make that happen. I'm going to put it aside for now in hopes I can come back one future day and try to figure out his "deeper meaning" within the text. I think it's a hard read if you really don't understand what he's trying to say.

[Trisha]

It seems like the parts that have to do with the actual mystery are very interesting, though William is a little too "Sherlock Holms-ish" for my liking, in that he tends to solve things with vague clues that the reader may not be aware of, which makes his reasoning seem a little far-fetched at times. The mystery itself is fun though, and I am curious to see where it leads.
However, there is too much time in between that is just bogged down with history and religion and other such things and it slows down the entire pace of the story.

[Mo]

I'm on page 198. It has been a little difficult to get into. With most books I'm able to read a few minutes at a time and follow the plot easily. I'm finding that I need to read this book when I have a half an hour or more available, then it seems to flow much better for me. I'm enjoying the story so far and am thinking that I'll have to watch the movie when I'm done.

[Trisha]

I didn't even know there was a movie until my husband mentioned it, and he said it was really good.

[Bob, Short Story Classics]

The Name of the Rose is our June 2016 Revisit the Shelf Reread. This is the original Spoiler thread from our first reading back in February 2012.

[Christine]

I just read this book a couple of months ago and I really liked it. It was not an easy read for me, and it did get slow in some parts, but I thought it was so, so interesting. I love reading about history and religion, so that might be why I liked it so much, and the Sherlock Holmes-style mystery was fun.

What does everyone else think of it?

[Leni]

I read it a couple of months ago too, and was completely blown away. But the book should come with a disclaimer: Not really a murder mystery! The murder mystery is just the plot-excuse for writing about everything else.

[Bob, Short Story Classics]

I can offer nothing positive, except I'm glad it's over.

[Christine]

Bob wrote: "I can offer nothing positive, except I'm glad it's over."

I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it, Bob. :-( What did you dislike about it?

[Bob, Short Story Classics]

Christine wrote: "Bob wrote: "I can offer nothing positive, except I'm glad it's over."

I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it, Bob. :-( What did you dislike about it?"

Just not what I expected. My Review

[Andrea AKA Catsos Person]

Bob, you are a trooper to have finished this book.

[Carol]

I adore this book. It's unlike anything else I've read and I'm glad I will be re-reading it for awhile. This time, though, I've made a list of names so I don't get confused between the various characters, and can refer to if if a day or two goes by between readings ...

[[deleted user]]

Whoa... That book was intense! It got pretty weird toward the end... like ergot mold hallucination weird. But that's okay. I like a little weirdness in my literature. It keeps things interesting.

I haven't read many modern novels set in Medieval Europe, and I enjoyed it for the most part. I loved experiencing this portrait of life in a monastery. The level of detail with which the author painted this portrait is amazing, making it clear that he was very passionate about Medieval history. His descriptions of the architecture and the illuminated manuscripts are beautiful, in my opinion.

I have to admit, though, that there were parts of this novel where I kind of zoned out and had to go back to reread, particularly those involving the church politics and whenever the abbot went off on one of his tirades (what in the world is he babbling about now?). But there were some really great scenes in this book that made up for it - Adso's encounter with the girl, Adso's dream/vision (the aforementioned weird part), and that final meeting between William and Jorge really stand out in my mind.

And I loved the ending! Just imagining the blind old Jorge running through the library/labyrinth while trying to eat the Aristotle manuscript... So cool... And I could really feel William's pain when the library burned, because a burning library is nothing less than tragic.

This was a good read. I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone else thought of it.

Oh, and the postscript is worth a read if it's included in your edition. It was interesting to see how the author gradually constructed this story, and it made me realize how much work and passion he put into it.

[Sue]

Wendy wrote: "Whoa... That book was intense! It got pretty weird toward the end... like ergot mold hallucination weird. But that's okay. I like a little weirdness in my literature. It keeps things interesting.

..."
Great comments Wendy. I pretty much agree on all points. In addition, I loved the theological debates on poverty & laughing. The discussion about how the Pope embraced the lepers as a way of controlling the rest of society was very interesting too. I also loved how William solved the Labyrinth by going outside of it and envisioning how it was built.

The ending was perfect. It was pretty intense. I didn't see the fire and everything coming, but it really was fitting in this story that involved so much theological debate. God is symbolized by fire in the old Testament. He refers to himself as fire at times and appeared as a burning bush to Moses, he also caused the Cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to be consumed by fire as judgement for their collective sins.

Holding the library as something to worship from afar, rather than letting it be used as a vehicle for knowledge and a more informed free will, was the spark that started the fire. Jorge was the accelerant but many others fanned the flames

There were parts of the book that dragged but there were so many good parts that outweighed those. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[[deleted user]]

Sue wrote: "Wendy wrote: "Whoa... That book was intense! It got pretty weird toward the end... like ergot mold hallucination weird. But that's okay. I like a little weirdness in my literature. It keeps things ..."

Yes! I loved it when William and Adso would work out a puzzle or problem together and have their "Eureka!" moments. Those two characters complement one another so well. They're like Batman and Robin :)

At first I was baffled by the laughter debate. Why would anyone be against laughing? Then I remembered that these are some very serious and religious men living at the tail end of the Dark Ages. It makes more sense within that historical context. Those philosophical discussions are pretty complex, so much that I think the book probably needs to be read more than once in order for one to fully appreciate it all.

And I agree on your observation that the library is ultimately destroyed because it is misused. I loved that final argument - that truth and knowledge should never be kept in darkness where only a few select people can see it.

[Sue]

Wendy wrote: "Sue wrote: "Wendy wrote: "Whoa... That book was intense! It got pretty weird toward the end... like ergot mold hallucination weird. But that's okay. I like a little weirdness in my literature. It k..."

They do compliment each other very well. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie adaptation. Sean Connery plays William and Christian Slater plays Adso. It will be interesting to see if they capture the magic.

[[deleted user]]

Sue wrote: "Wendy wrote: "Sue wrote: "Wendy wrote: "Whoa... That book was intense! It got pretty weird toward the end... like ergot mold hallucination weird. But that's okay. I like a little weirdness in my li..."

Oh, the movie! I can see Sean Connery as William. I'll definitely have to check it out too. Christian Slater was adorable back in the eighties. :)

I wonder if this group has a discussion thread about movies that are adapted from the books we're reading? I love comparing the books to the movies, but I only watch them *after* I've finished the book.

[Sue]

Wendy wrote: "Sue wrote: "Wendy wrote: "Sue wrote: "Wendy wrote: "Whoa... That book was intense! It got pretty weird toward the end... like ergot mold hallucination weird. But that's okay. I like a little weirdn..."

Same here Wendy, I love comparing and reading the book 1st. I try to anyway. If I've seen the movie 1st, I'd have to wait a really long time to read the book. Unlike most, I usually like a movie if I liked the book (and vice versa). I don't expect them to be the same and I enjoy seeing other people's interpretations.

I'd love to see a thread like you mentioned

[Leni]

I watched the movie years ago. It's good, but necessarily rather different. It focuses on the action and the murder mystery. Christian Slayer was so young! Late teens.

[Nathalie]

What a book!

I agree with Wendy that this is a book you should read more than once to fully comprehend all the different layers. But I already enjoyed it this time around.

I also thought all these religious philosophical debated very interesting apart from the mystery. The ending was also highly satisfying.

I'm really curious about the film adaption now.

[Melanti]

What a depressing book...

A library full of books that no one is allowed to read, hidden away in the name of preservation and hearsay.

A building, like hundreds of others, full of people arguing and killing each other over petty arguments over which variation of their faith is the correct one, which leader is the correct one.

Arguing about pointless questions of faith - all based off of what one particular guy 1300 years before might or might not have done.

And vault full of expensive but fake relics that do no one any good, but are hidden away except on extremely special occasions. And where did the gold to buy them come from? What other good could it have done if it hadn't been used on a hoard of fraudulent artifacts?

And this repeated itself for CENTURIES - wasting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people...

Just incredibly, incredibly depressing - and that's before taking the fire into account!
And then Adso missing the point of the library and attempting to reconstruct a mockery of it in his old age... Gah.

It's really, really well written, but such a horribly sad book.

[Nente]

Melanti,
I would say that the biggest "message" in The Name of the Rose is anti-religion - I think most of your points might boil down to that, too.
Brother William seems to me to have exactly the world-view of atheist humanist, though naturally he cannot voice it in the circumstances (and so Adso misses it by a mile).

[Melanti]

Nente wrote: "Melanti,
I would say that the biggest "message" in The Name of the Rose is anti-religion - I think most of your points might boil down to that, too.
Brother William seems to me to have exactly the ..."

I agree that William was a humanist of some sort or at least acted from that world view. Not sure about the atheist part, though. I was thinking deist.

I agree that anti-religion (or at least, organized religion which amounts to nearly the same thing in that era) was an ongoing message in the book.

Adso missing the whole point of what William was trying to teach him was awful.

If he had learned something during that week, I could have thought to myself "okay, the 14th century sucked, but the Renaissance will be here any day now!" But instead, Adso explicitly says the older that he gets, the less he cares about knowledge and asking questions. And then he talks about his fragmentary library - which can't actually be read - and it just hammers home the hopelessness.... If, after all that, Adso didn't even understand that the value in books is in reading them, then it was all for absolutely nothing.

[Sue]

Melanti wrote: "Nente wrote: "Melanti,
I would say that the biggest "message" in The Name of the Rose is anti-religion - I think most of your points might boil down to that, too.
Brother William seems to me to hav..."

I didn't think it was anti-religion (or pro-religion). I don't even think it was necessarily anti-Catholic. William, Jorge and Adso all considered themselves Catholics so there was good and evil within the faith as well as varying altruistic opinions. It was the same with the heretics some heretics (forget the names) merely disagreed on tenants while others raped and murdered. The new Roman government and antipope tortured and murdered to the point where William had to flee. If he hadn't still been Catholic, there wouldn't have been the need.

The fact that William was so astonished by the secrecy of the library combined with the fact that he gained his knowledge through other ones and additionally that other monks came to the Abby because of it's large library, seem to imply that keeping books and knowledge locked away was not necessarily systemic to the Catholic church but rather to this particular Abby. It's likely of course that, as with the government of the time, there was always some degree of censorship happening in all of them in terms of historical perspective.

I believe that Eco left things intentionally vague and all of the characters flawed in some aspect and to varying degrees so that people could form their own interpretations. For me the message was more of a free will one and true free will only being obtained through knowledge of varying thoughts and the constant need to re-evaluate to avoid dogmatism. William through all his learning in logic, metaphysics, mathematics and scripture still ends up coming up with the right answer merely by chance, because he gets trapped in a line of thought.

Adso ended up as a tragic figure and it seems Eco had him give up knowledge and religion to again leave more up for interpretation. Had he given up only one it would have seemed more clear cut but even then, the reader could choose to decide if he was a hero or not.

[Melanti]

Sue wrote: "The new Roman government and antipope tortured and murdered to the point where William had to flee. If he hadn't still been Catholic, there wouldn't have been the need. ..."

Which is one of the reasons I lean towards deistic rather than atheistic. (Though the term deistic is an anachronism.) If William hadn't believed at all, he could have walked away.

But it's anti-dogmatic and Catholicism - especially 14th century Catholicism - is more or less defined by its dogmatism. I'm not sure you can be anti-dogmatic and pro-Catholic in that era. To me, that doesn't compute.

Sue wrote: "Adso ended up as a tragic figure and it seems Eco had him give up knowledge and religion to again leave more up for interpretation. Had he given up only one it would have seemed more clear cut but even then, the reader could choose to decide if he was a hero or not. ..."

I didn't see that Adso gave up religion at all. He's writing the book as an old monk in a monastery. And at one point he says that as he grows older, the more he just accepts the whim of god rather than struggling to comprehend it, etc. He definitely gave up knowledge, but not religion.

[Sue]

Melanti wrote: "Sue wrote: "The new Roman government and antipope tortured and murdered to the point where William had to flee. If he hadn't still been Catholic, there wouldn't have been the need. ..."

Which is o..."

I could see Adso as ultimately deistic maybe, but not William. It's up to the imagination I guess because there is nothing to indicate that William gave up his faith. With Adso however, there are his words saying he gave up on the religion he had previously lived by. On the very last page he says "... and I no longer believe that it is the God of glory of whom the abbots of my order spoke to me, or of joy, as the Minorites believed in those days, perhaps not even of piety." In the end, he formulated his own belief system.

I definitely didn't take it as pro Catholic either. Yes it was anti-Catholic in so much as it was anti-other belief systems as well. Those who said the current Catholic authority was definitively wrong were just as dogmatic as the Catholics who thought they were definitively right.

In arguing about poverty for example, is it really that black and white? Or can good and evil exist among the rich and among the poor? The novel had examples of good and evil in both classes.

And with the laughter argument, it seems obvious to say laughter is a great thing when you don't allow that laughter can actually be evil too. Laughter can be used to ridicule and to desensitize horrors like when they were farting and vomiting on the poor peasant girl who had been Adso's love interest. Jorge is laughing in the end.

I loved all the ambiguities.

[Melanti]

Sue wrote: " "... and I no longer believe that it is the God of glory of whom the abbots of my order spoke to me, or of joy, as the Minorites believed in those days, perhaps not even of piety.". ..."

The "It" there is referring to heaven, not god.
He's saying his concept of heaven has changed, and that it's not a place or state of being joyous or basking in the glory of god, etc.

I can't quite grasp what his concept of heaven is, though. Nothingness? Solitude? Sameness? I'm not sure, but it does seem to indicate to me that his concept of heaven involves giving up of the ego. Which is kind of problematic for me. What's the point of heaven if you're giving up all that makes you yourself instead of someone else?

But I guess if you lived in a time where fighting between the different religious sects caused so much death and chaos, sameness would probably indicate peace and an end to the fighting.

[Sue]

He's talking about God in Heaven I believe. So I think his concept of both God and heaven had to have changed from what the church taught.

I agree that his concept was very confusing and seemingly unappealing.

I think that you're right about him looking for peace. Let's hope for us, that Heaven is a place where differences and peace exist together : )

[Lynn, New School Classics]

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is the Revisit the Shelf group selection for the month of March 2022.

I hope you enjoy it!

[Natalie]

I made it through over 50% and decided I had to DNF. I didn't care about anything that was happening.

I've never really been into the whole "signs and symbols" thing and I realized the "lives and times of monks" is a subject that I have zero interest in. I think the only reason I listened as long as I did was because I found the narrator's voice relaxing. It was great background noise. :)

I also predicted the "bad guy" from the beginning and I'm usually terrible at that. I went and read a summary of the end to see if I was correct. I didn't figure out how it all came to pass, but I did mostly predict the motivation for the murders.

I got the feeling that the murder was secondary Eco sharing all the information he knows about that time period. I can see why some people would really love this book and find a lot of depth in it, but it's definitely not for me.