The Name of the Rose might be one of the most overrated books of all time. It continues to sneak onto canonical lists of essential literary fiction to this day. It looms large as one of those books people assume is important, that they must read. If only they could get around to it.

It's one of those books, I think, where its reputation and gestalt is more important than the text itself. What happens in The Name of the Rose does not matter. What matters is that there is such a book that is supposedly filled with semiotics, riddles, biblical esoterica, theological debates, hermeneutics, etc. The idea of such a book is intriguing and gratifying of one's intelligence and good taste. It is perfect for the reader who sees the act of reading not as engagement with an art form, but as the formal exercise of the middle class, to be slogged through joylessly, knuckles white.

It is a dreary, pretentious novel written by an academic. Despite the fact that storytelling here is subordinate to its many displays of intellectualism, I found its subject matter very basic (or should I say elementary...?) and surface level. I could be wrong about this, but I just don't believe 14th century Italian monks were arguing about whether or not Jesus laughed. They were much deeper into Christian metaphysics and incredibly granular debates than we modern day people are willing to credit them for. Here they are cast as Monty Pythonian fools we should smirk at, euphoric, enlightened by rationalism and science. The only character whose thought-processes and methods of interpretation are not accompanied by a laugh track is the detective character, William of Baskerville (yes, really), who thinks exactly like a modern day rationalist and who constantly name-drops early scientific thinkers, always rolling his eyes when he gets stuck in unskippeable dialogue with a pesky monk NPC.

It reminds me of how I feel about "Book of Numbers" by Joshua Cohen, in which Cohen attempts to write a Pynchon-like epic about computing and Silicon Valley, except Cohen doesn't know anything about either of those things. And so he weirdly attempts to form in-world gnosticism out of compsci 101 like HTML documents. The verisimilitude and disbelief-suspension falls apart if you've ever written so little as a line of Python. This is the dilemma of the academic dilettante writer thinking their broad but shallow research excuses them from storycraft. The illusion does not hold for anyone familiar with the subject matter.

Anyway, the mystery plot itself is deeply unsatisfying. There are Elder Scrolls Oblivion quests with better riddlecraft and more enigma than this. I'm convinced Eco's prestige is owed to the boomer-era orientalism of the "magical realism" craze, in which every hack with an Italian or Spanish surname was hurriedly enshrined in the literary canon (urged along by their publishers, no doubt). Umberto Eco was to our parents generation what Hanya Yanagihara is to ours - upmarket airport fiction sold as literary fiction to disinterested readers-in-name-only looking for something to gather dust on their nightstand. This belongs beside Lincoln in the Bardo and Hamnet.

But Eco's worst crime is that he simply does not here have an ear for medievalness. Which is strange, because this guy was literally a professor of medieval aesthetics. It never felt believably medieval to me. Not in tone, dialogue, atmosphere, setting, nothing. Sure, there is the circular theological debate, the untranslated latin, the long lifeless passages describing gargoyles and church statuary (in what feels like an attempt at McCarthy-esque parataxis), but Rose never captures the texture of the middle ages that I know I've felt in other works of historical fiction, it does not itself believe the middle ages or medieval thought or worldview are worthy of treating with except as farce (though it's never funny). It is uncommitted, unserious, as though the characters are all LARPers in a murder mystery bachelor party. Actually, it reminded me a lot of those Star Trek TNG episodes where Picard and Data play around on the holodeck.

So instead of reading Eco's boring pastiche of medieval Sherlock Holmes. why not just read medieval fiction written by Arthur Conan Doyle himself? After freeing himself of Holmes, Doyle fervently studied medieval history and wrote uproarious historical fiction. Why did Umberto Eco feel a medieval Holmes romp was necessary, when Doyle himself was in the position to do so, but did not? The White Company, besides being more believably medieval (in the ways it should be-- weird, fantastical!), is also funnier, but capable of great feeling, and on the sentence level beautiful and rhythmic. This might come as a surprise, because the Sherlock Holmes novels are fairly prosaic, but Doyle, when writing for love and not his publisher, is a very different writer indeed.

How does Doyle introduce his own abbot?

"[The Abbott's] thought-worn features and sunken, haggard cheeks bespoke one who had indeed beaten down that inner foe whom every man must face, but had none the less suffered sorely in the contest. In crushing his passions he had well-nigh crushed himself. Yet, frail as was his person there gleamed out ever and anon from under his drooping brows a flash of fierce energy, which recalled to men's minds that he came of a fighting stock, and that even now his twin-brother, Sir Bartholomew Berghersh, was one of the most famous of those stern warriors who had planted the Cross of St. George before the gates of Paris."

Umberto Eco does not love storytelling enough to give you passages like this.

earthlike_croak

earthlike_croak