Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by iso__bel
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
5.0
Really beautiful, I can't believe it took me this long to pick it up.
Others have said it but Eco's writing is so wonderful at properly putting you in the mind of people from history who genuinely thinks completely differently about the world. The argument that seeking knowledge and progress is a type of lust, and is actually incoherent, because everything worth knowing has already been written in scripture , is so alien to how we think about anything in the modern world, and it takes skill to make that hang together.
Along similar lines, this book showed me wonderfully just how millenarian and apocalyptic mediaeval christianity was, another completely alien viewpoint. Obviously modern Catholicism still holds these views, but for (some of) the monks in this book, "the time is at hand" isn't just theoretical and far off, but literal and within their lifetimes. (Maybe this is still stressed in some Catholic teachings - I wasn't raised religious, so this is really far out of my experiences).
Jorge's motivations, to prevent laughter from legitimising the 'vulgar tongue', for me is tied together by a passage midway through, when the peasant girl is being captured as a witch:-
"For all her shouting, she was as if mute. There are words which give power, others that make us all the more derelict, and to this latter category belong the vulgar words of the simple, to whom the Lord has not granted the boon of self expression in the universal tongue of knowledge and power".
So much there which you can still chew on today (not least what's happening right now in some other holy lands). Talking of that, the entire storyline with the peasant girl affected me much more than I was expecting. This passage almost brought me to tears, :-
"The only sure thing was that the girl would be burned. And I felt responsible, because it was as if she would also expiate on the pyre the sin I had committed with her. I burst shamefully into sobs and fled to my cell, where all through the night I chewed my pallet and moaned helplessly, for I was not even allowed – as they did in the romances of chivalry I had read with my companions at Melk - to lament and call out the beloveds name. This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name."
And that's it, we never see her again! Just an understated, beautiful, and tragic depiction of love, from a monk who can barely understand the concept, which takes an epistemic injustice (which the entire book is ofc about) and makes you feel the real consequences of it.
I so rarely reread books, but I know I'll come back to this one. Just wonderful.
Others have said it but Eco's writing is so wonderful at properly putting you in the mind of people from history who genuinely thinks completely differently about the world. The argument that seeking knowledge and progress is a type of lust, and is actually incoherent, because everything worth knowing has already been written in scripture , is so alien to how we think about anything in the modern world, and it takes skill to make that hang together.
Along similar lines, this book showed me wonderfully just how millenarian and apocalyptic mediaeval christianity was, another completely alien viewpoint. Obviously modern Catholicism still holds these views, but for (some of) the monks in this book, "the time is at hand" isn't just theoretical and far off, but literal and within their lifetimes. (Maybe this is still stressed in some Catholic teachings - I wasn't raised religious, so this is really far out of my experiences).
Jorge's motivations, to prevent laughter from legitimising the 'vulgar tongue', for me is tied together by a passage midway through, when the peasant girl is being captured as a witch:-
"For all her shouting, she was as if mute. There are words which give power, others that make us all the more derelict, and to this latter category belong the vulgar words of the simple, to whom the Lord has not granted the boon of self expression in the universal tongue of knowledge and power".
So much there which you can still chew on today (not least what's happening right now in some other holy lands). Talking of that, the entire storyline with the peasant girl affected me much more than I was expecting. This passage almost brought me to tears, :-
"The only sure thing was that the girl would be burned. And I felt responsible, because it was as if she would also expiate on the pyre the sin I had committed with her. I burst shamefully into sobs and fled to my cell, where all through the night I chewed my pallet and moaned helplessly, for I was not even allowed – as they did in the romances of chivalry I had read with my companions at Melk - to lament and call out the beloveds name. This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name."
And that's it, we never see her again! Just an understated, beautiful, and tragic depiction of love, from a monk who can barely understand the concept, which takes an epistemic injustice (which the entire book is ofc about) and makes you feel the real consequences of it.
I so rarely reread books, but I know I'll come back to this one. Just wonderful.