Take a photo of a barcode or cover
carolinapie 's review for:
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
challenging
informative
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
This book made me feel simultaneously indifferent and infuriated.
The writing was incredibly dense and did not need to be, though the style was consistent and fit the story.
I zoned out so many times while reading this. I started off reading it as an e-book, then thought I might follow it better as an audiobook, and then I read a paper copy while listening to the audiobook and I still missed a bunch.
I figure that this book would be better on a reread but I just couldn’t do that to myself again.
A lot of people loved it and I can understand why but the writing style is really what got me.
Infuriatingly, we get the story and we find out who was behind it and we learn more about the unreliable narrator - that being the young student monk who is writing his memories for this book as well as the conclusions drawn by his mentor. The mentor himself calls himself a fool because he drew lots of conclusions that ended up being not completely correct and it just happened to be solved through a series of wrong conclusions (GAH).
We learn whodunit - the damn dude who argued that Jesus didn’t laugh - I should have known! What an arrogant guy but also, who would suspect a blind man?
It was simultaneously the student and the mentor’s fault that the library and the secret book ended up burning because they underestimated a crazed old blind monk who was already suicidal but obviously the old monk didn’t want that book to remain even if it meant burning down the library (the tears I nearly shed while the library catching fire was described).
If they had just let the old monk eat the poisoned book pages the abbey wouldn’t have burned down but the mentor was so transfixed on this pursuit of secret knowledge that the abbey was destroyed.
And sure, we have connections between doing what is apparently gods will and what people interpret as gods will.
I need to read a literary analysis of this because I want to understand it better.
The writing was incredibly dense and did not need to be, though the style was consistent and fit the story.
I zoned out so many times while reading this. I started off reading it as an e-book, then thought I might follow it better as an audiobook, and then I read a paper copy while listening to the audiobook and I still missed a bunch.
I figure that this book would be better on a reread but I just couldn’t do that to myself again.
A lot of people loved it and I can understand why but the writing style is really what got me.
Infuriatingly, we get the story and we find out who was behind it and we learn more about the unreliable narrator - that being the young student monk who is writing his memories for this book as well as the conclusions drawn by his mentor. The mentor himself calls himself a fool because he drew lots of conclusions that ended up being not completely correct and it just happened to be solved through a series of wrong conclusions (GAH).
We learn whodunit - the damn dude who argued that Jesus didn’t laugh - I should have known! What an arrogant guy but also, who would suspect a blind man?
It was simultaneously the student and the mentor’s fault that the library and the secret book ended up burning because they underestimated a crazed old blind monk who was already suicidal but obviously the old monk didn’t want that book to remain even if it meant burning down the library (the tears I nearly shed while the library catching fire was described).
If they had just let the old monk eat the poisoned book pages the abbey wouldn’t have burned down but the mentor was so transfixed on this pursuit of secret knowledge that the abbey was destroyed.
And sure, we have connections between doing what is apparently gods will and what people interpret as gods will.
I need to read a literary analysis of this because I want to understand it better.