The Name of the Rose

⚖The case for it

William of Baskerville and his novice Adso are Holmes and Watson in a fourteenth-century abbey, and the deduction genuinely works. The library is why people reread: a labyrinth built deliberately to keep readers out of it, and the setting reviewers name first. Eco stacks the poverty of Christ, Franciscan and Benedictine rivalry, and a taxonomy of heresies on top of a murder plot, and readers who push through call the result “a book about books,” the “world as a blizzard of signs.” The argument underneath, that when “faith turns into fanaticism, it becomes evil,” outlives its medieval setting by some distance.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Long stretches of untranslated Latin, with Greek and German besides, break immersion every time they arrive: “Page after page of this. Grrr.” The first hundred pages are the toll, and readers describe serving them as penance to earn the rest. The theological digressions read to many as dissertations bolted onto a murder plot, “pedantry disguised as fiction” from a writer more interested in his own range than in anybody’s attention. “Horribly pretentious, pedantic, verbose.” The postscript some editions carry irritates readers separately from the novel. The impatient just want to “name the rose Barry and be done with it.”

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings