Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
Published: 1980
Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery
CW: Religious Bigotry, Death, Murder, Homophobia, Suicide, Sexual Content, Animal Death, Torture, Confinement
Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)
In the winter of 1327, Benedictine novice Adso of Melk travels to an Italian monastery with his Franciscan teacher, William of Baskerville, to partake in a theological debate. Their arrival, however, coincides with a series of strange deaths among the order. Armed with his deductive skills, William investigates the murders, stumbling across several conspiracies along the way.
Umberto Eco's debut novel revels in his academic background. He paints a vivid picture of life in a medieval monastery, not shying away from the maggots that infest a society built on religious fanatism, where sexism, racism, and homophobia abound. This candid depiction of 12th-century Italy, combined with the monks' many theological and philosophical discussions, doesn't make for an easy read and would probably frighten away some potential readers. But I found myself drawn in by the challenge.
This is one of the few mystery novels that made me feel like a detective while reading. I filled several pages of my notebook with Latin phrases Eco left untranslated to later decipher. I felt giddy whenever I recognized a literary reference, no matter how obvious: William of Baskerville is clearly meant to be the medieval equivalent of Sherlock Holmes (at one point, Eco has him state, "It seems elementary to me," just in case the reader hasn't caught on), while Jorge of Burgos, the abbey's blind librarian, is a clever nod to Jorge Luis Borges, author of "The Library of Babel."
These references, however, pulled me into the same trap as the protagonists. Eco was, among many other things, a student of semiotics—the study of signs—and knew that the one aspect all mysteries share is that they can only be solved when the investigator interprets the signs (i.e., the clues) correctly. Adso and William's investigation takes longer than expected because they keep focusing on signs that turn out to be red herrings. My own "investigation" was full of these detours: early in the novel, when I realized that many of the characters' names were literary references, I formed a theory that the first monk to die, Adelmo of Otranto, was an allusion to Horace Walpole's gothic novel The Castle of Otranto; a theory that went nowhere. Later on, I seriously questioned whether an elderly monk asking Adso for chickpeas to snack on was passing a secret message on to the novice, and then paused to actually consider what I had just written down. A clever ploy, Eco, indeed.
There are only three issues I have with the novel. First, the excessive info dumps. Adso often pauses the narrative to provide some historical context about the political environment the characters reside in. I will admit, Eco finds a way to make this exposition less jarring than in other books, but by the last third, I was begging for him to just leave some things unexplained.
Second, some of the characters share the same name. This isn't too egregious, but I was incredibly confused when a monk who arrived midway through the story to take part in the debate had the exact same name as a monk who was murdered in the previous chapter. Even if "Berengar" was a popular name in the 12th century, it seems odd that none of the characters acknowledged this coincidence.
And finally, the only female character—one of many peasant girls coerced by the abbey's cellarer to perform sexual favours in exchange for food—exists solely for Adso to lose his virginity. It is the weakest and most frustrating storyline in the whole novel.
While Eco's main focus with this text is semiotics, what really drew me into the narrative was its commentary on censorship. William's investigation is largely hindered because the abbot refuses to let him search the abbey's library, which only the two librarians and their assistant are allowed to enter to avoid letting the knowledge within fall into "the wrong hands." Working around these limitations, William deduces that the murders are an attempt to keep the monks from reading a manuscript deemed heretical.
At a time when parents are calling for schools to ban books containing any trace of queerness, when TikTok users are forced to practice self-censorship to avoid having their videos deleted, and when Facebook prevents users in certain countries from sharing news articles, The Name of the Rose feels more relevant than ever.