Well folks, I did it! I can’t believe that I did but I finally, finished The Name of the Rose! Exciting right? It was a long, long time ago that I started it. A pattern soon emerged: I would read 40 pages, then put it down. Look at it a month later and PROMISE myself that I’d read at least 200 more. I’d read only 40 pages, then put it down again, and again, and again. Finally, when I started riding the bus I forced myself to carry it everywhere with me. I didn’t let myself pick up another book until I was done with it. Even then, I found excuses. I would read the newspaper, chat with fellow bus-riders (this last showing my true desperation). But finally, there was nothing left to do but read the book. Why stick with it you ask? Why not just toss it aside forever? Believe me, I could have. I have absolutely no compunctions about tossing horrible books aside. But this book wasn’t horrible. It was interesting, historical, and the reader can tell that there lies a true mania behind this book. 500 pages of amazing detail. Have I mentioned how good this book is? It is easily a modern classic. I think that it will certainly stand the test of time, and I have no doubt that readers will still find this book as compelling in 100 years as they do now.
Let me talk about the mania that I mentioned earlier. That this is the first novel of a professor of semiotics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics is mind boggling. The detail, the level of writing, the pace of the dialogue…is that of someone who has been writing for years. This book my friends is the direct work of a madman. He thought about every single little detail. Let’s take a moment to consider this section in his afterward:
“My novel had another, working title which was The Abbey of the Crime. I rejected it because it concentrates the reader’s attention entirely on the mystery story and might wrongly lure and mislead purchasers looking for an action-packed yarn. The idea of calling my book The Name of the Rose came to me virtually by chance, and I like it because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left: Dante’s mystic rose, and go lovely rose, the Wars of the Roses, rose thou art sick, too many rings around Rosie, a rose by any other name, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, the Rosicurician. The title rightly disoriented the reader, who was unable to choose just one interpretation; and even if he were to catch the possible nomialist readings of the concluding verse, he would come to them only at the end, having previously made God only knows what other choices. A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them.”
Good grief man! That’s just the title. And in case you have yet to fully grasp Eco’s mania let me explain to you again how hard this book was to get through. IT WAS HARD! Harder than Don Quixote, (which I love). Harder than Moby Dick, and for the love that is everything literary it was harder than any Henry James book I ever picked up. How I loathe Henry James… Back on topic, it really was the first one hundred pages that were the hardest to get through. Umberto has something so say about that though:
" After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away….Rhythm, pace, penitence… For whom? For me? No, certainly not. For the reader.”
At this point he goes on for pages about how he wanted to construct the perfect reader. What else do you expect from a man who wrote The Role of the Reader? And his mania doesn’t stop there. Oh no my friend it took him years to write this book, that’s why it’s so detailed.
“ The first year of work on my novel was devoted to the construction of the world. Long registers of all the books that could be found in a medieval library. Lists of names and personal data for many characters, a number of whom were then excluded form the story. In other words, I had to know who the rest of the monks were, those who do not appear in the book. It was not necessary for the reader to know them, but I had to know them. Who ever said that fiction must compete with the city directory? Perhaps it must also compete with the panning board. There fore I conducted long architectural investigations, studying photographs and floor pans in the encyclopedia of architecture, to establish the arrangement of the abbey, the distances, even the number of steps in a spiral staircase. The film director Marco Ferreri once said to me that my dialogue is like a movie’s because it last exactly the right length of time. It had to. When two of my characters spoke while walking from the refectory to the cloister, I wrote with the plan before my eyes; and when they reached their destination, they stopped talking.”
