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Good, but rambles too much on factional disputes....
“I bought this because of the consistent references in other book reviews which referred to this book as a significant standard in historical mystery novels. It is pretty long, and I became tired of the constant ramblings about who should be pope/king, and arguments between various, obscure (to me), Catholic factions. Once I began to skip over all these asides, I enjoyed the actual parts about the murder mysteries and the main characters' work toward solving them.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-11-04. -
2 of 5 members found this review helpful.
This book is intellectually dishonest
“I've read these other Amazon reviews and I'm a little disappointed that apparently no one here has understood the book. What people haven't realized is that Eco is simply making fun of them and of their ignorance about philosophy. He is giving the reader the impression that he's telling him/her something about medieval intellectual debates. In fact, he is, to a very large extent, making these debates up.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-28.
His approach is quite ingenious, but you are not going to appreciate it if you are not familiar with medieval philosophy AND with modern analytical philosophy, and Eco is not really giving you any clue that he's making things up about medieval philosophy. What Eco does is to implement modern ideas from 20th century analytical philosophy into medieval terminology. So for example he is attributing Wittgenstein's ideas about 'family resemblances' to William of Ockham.
To many readers, this book is giving a false impression that they are learning something about the late medieval period when in fact this book is a PARODY. Like any parody, you are required to have some prior knowledge in order to be able to get the joke. But, it seems to me, that, given the obscure subject, it was predictable that many people would not get the joke and would take the 'debates' described in the book at face value. Nonetheless, Eco is happy to leave all these readers in the dark and just have a laugh on them in private. I find this attitude obnoxious. (To be fair, there is one place in the book in which Eco clearly does wink at the reader: at one point one of the monks has an apocalyptic vision which clearly describes a nuclear war; this should have made more readers wonder about the extent to which the entire novel, and not just that particular scene, is built by means of implementing modern themes in a medieval framework, but apparently most readers have failed to get it.)
Moreover, for such a pretentious book, it does not live up to the existing literary standard. I often got the impression that Eco is just an amateur writer trying to copy Borges or Saramago or even Marquez. For example the endless (pages long) enumerations, while definitely funny, do not fit into the text organically, but seem to be inserted around the book at random. Also, when it comes to creating characters, Eco is doing a really bad job. The characters in The Name of the Rose are cartoonish at best. While this might be a feature rather than a bug (e.g. it works pretty well in Foucault's Pendulum), this is not the case here. In this book it is pretty clear that the characters are poorly developed because Eco is simply UNABLE to create credible or somewhat in-depth psychologies.
My advice is not to read this book unless you familiarize yourself with medieval and modern analytical philosophy FIRST. I would recommand instead two other books by Eco, Baudolino and Foucault's Pendulum, which are more intellectually honest, in that the parody is made more clear, and are written with much more skill (The Name of the Rose is Eco's first book so perhaps it may be excused for some of its literary shortcomings).” -
Meh
“Reviewers rave about Eco's verbose writing style but I honestly found his pages and pages of description to be superfluous filler that really took away from the story. The author would often spend so many pages describing a room the main characters walked into that I would then need to look back and see why the characters entered the room in the first place.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-14.
The story itself was relatively mediocre in my opinion; or at least it ended up being mediocre. I found my myself unable to put the book down as I anxiously pushed on to unravel the mystery and see William apprehend the culprits but the ending was an utter disappointment. That the killing would revolve around an old man hiding a book of laughter was just stupid.
Those that find the back cover interesting would be best off reading Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series. Umberto Eco is undoubtedly a first rate scholar but Peters just tells a better story.
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another historical mystery
“ This another historical mystery. It is probably the best of its kind. The detective is special and he spends a lot of time explaining why he is so rational and looking for facts. This is in the age of superstition, 1300s. Even Sir Isaac Newton was looking for magic in the Bible, and this is way before Sir Newton and the accumulated knowledge he had available.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-23.
A monk, Adso of Melk, wrote this story in his old age of a time when he was a young novice Benedictine sixty (60) years before. It was his duty to assist Brother William of Baskerville, a Franciscan monk, as he went to a Benedictine monastery for a meeting for political talks. Before they get to the monastery, the first body has been discovered, and the vaunted talents of Brother William at deduction are called into play. Brother William has to solve the mystery before the talks begin to assuage the participants of their security. But daily, there is a new body found and so begins the race to find the killer.
It is interesting all the detail that is written into the story, such as the door way to the church, because it is written sixty (60) or so years after the fact. The superstitions he alludes to are all very real and relevant.” -
2 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Nomina Nuda Tenemus
“(In response to the
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-08-11.
Your opinion, not bad; or I have no right to say bad or good about it, since I believe when Borges said 'Every reader creates his own writer' Your Eco certainly seems very different from my Eco, who taught me way more than a detective story might have.
However, I'd like to share an idea that may shed another light on your view. Firstly, in the introduction of the novel Eco made it very clearly that he was writing not aiming for the popular (or for 'The Simples', as William might have said), but for the privileged few who are learned, intellectual, and perspicacious enough to divine the intricate network of ulterior allusions and insinuations that are crucial, if not essential, to the novel and its theme. So trust me. Though I do not know much, I know this; the more you know, the more you will get from this book.
Secondly, you seem to have disregarded, or gave no heed to the so-called-boring part of the novel (thing that you call 'information'), that tested your patience. For me, however, the whole book was of an organic structure in which every part participates to the whole (and unites in variety, varies in unity) In 'The name of the rose', the case of the murder and the process of resolving the mystery may not be as central to the understanding of this novel as you think. Rather, to think in the light of the title that goes 'The name of the Rose' (and also considering the very last sentence of the novel: Stat Rosa Pristina Nomine, Nomina Nuda Tenemus), I think what is central should not be the mystery and the murder themselves, but the 'nature' of the mystery and the murder which is blurring, confusing, and somewhat misleading. The topics discussed throughout the novel: Murder, Heretics, Poverty of Jesus, Licitness of laughter, and General order of the universe are never stated in definite words, their dichotomic borders erased by relativism of thoughts. Although framed in the sturcture of a detective story, 'The name of the rose' is actually picturing our inescapable human contradictions and paradoxes, subordination of individual souls to the collectivity, praising but at last satirizing the science and logic to which we owe our contemporary society. In my imagination that is no less real than this world, I hear Eco echoing 'Where should we expect to find a value in this world?' Think finally of the structure of the 'scripture' which Adso wrote and was translated by the author. Author (or translator) in the beginning is agonized by the problem of which style (not only style) he should employ in translating the scripture (and how trustworthy is this translator!). Adso himself at the end confesses 'I no longer know why and for whom I wrote this scripture...' From the very beginning to the end, I see numerous traces of uncertainty and examples of dualism that are 'united in their variety, varied in their unity'... I ask this last question: Did this event take place in the medieval period, or in our contemporary society?
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