The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco

How beautiful the world would be
if there were a procedure for moving
through labyrinths.

Labyrinths has long sat on my various bookshelves (at least since 2014, and is currently lost in a box somewhere in the desolate, dusty wastes of my as yet deconstructed new home) existing conflictingly both as something to be desired and something to be avoided. Yes, it’s an acknowledged masterpiece by a canonical genius. But it’s also short stories and essays. And you know how I feel about those.

However, it may yet find its way shortly into my work bag (once recovered) and thus into my brain via my eyes on the commute, and it has a lot to do with Umberto Eco and this historical murder mystery.

Better humans than I have extolled the great verisimilitude, scholarship, historicity and semeiotic brilliance of Eco’s debut novel – that’s right, it’s his FIRST NOVEL – so you won’t find me banging on about it. In fact, you should probably go away and read this article by David Fish and be more entertained and informed and left more in awe of this book than you thought possible. I prefer instead to consider Eco’s decision to include in the story in a pivotal role a blind monk named Jorge de Burgos. A blatant nod to blind Argentinian writer, poet and essayist Jorge Luis Borges or what? In fact, pre-Roberto Bolaňo, Eco exploits both of the first two waves of Latin American literature; he rides the coat-tails of Miguel De Cervantes by positing the entire book as a found (and then translated, and then translated) manuscript, just like Don Quixote (about which Borges himself wrote a great short story; Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote); he then uses the labyrinthine library (and old monk) of the monastery to explore something of the magic realism and semiotics of Borges’ second wave. However, Eco’s insistence on its historicity (that great word again) sets it against some of the more metafictional and surreal aspects of his lauded antecedents and sets himself apart but also in thrall to Borgean literature. And it’s not likely you’ll not have read this book, seeing as how it’s probably as big as the bible, so I have no qualms in relating that blind Jorge (the old monk) is the puppet master, the Moriarty to Sean Conn—I mean William of Baskerville’s Holmes.

So, basically, it’s all about Borges.

And that, intertextually-speaking, is the reason that Labyrinths will be next up, as soon as I’ve discovered wherever it’s hiding….

But back to Eco’s murder mystery; William of Baskerville is a very clever fellow, deducing things through the careful study of the symbols all around him, teaching young Adso all about logic and reasoning but also about religious history and other, more poetic things. But still, blind old Jorge manages to discombobulate and ultimately defeat him, in the process destroying the only copy of Aristotle's second volume of Poetics in existence, and killing seven (or is it more?) monks, one for each of the trumpets sounded at the breaking of the seventh sacred seal before the second coming or the arrival of the Antichrist or whatever, as well as burning down the infamous library. AND William fails in his attempts to negotiate the clemency of the Pope for his Franciscan brethren. Not so clever now, eh?

Erudition apart, it’s a thoroughly entertaining if often ponderous romp through the fictional lives of historical characters and is a total embarrassment for any aspiring novelist who puts up anything less for public scrutiny as their first offering. You may not enjoy it as much as I did (for the most part), but I trust you’ll at least be happy to acquiesce to Eco’s brilliance.

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