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A review by tptimmons
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
4.0
The novel grew on me in the final third. Honestly, I was underwhelmed by it until this point. After the fun wore off of Eco painting the medieval world of the monastery, I grew impatient, despite William B's discourses and the church heresy stuff. However, boy, the final third really got me. as the novel began deconstructing itself, becoming less about the solving "the mystery" (a la a detective novel) and more about intertextuality, semiotics, and Derridean deconstruction. Speaking of Derrida, is there a more Derridean novel out there? THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE THE TEXT. And (something like) text begets and refers to text. And (something like) there is no plot, only accident.
I mean, as such, the novel contains a literary bomb in its core, disguising itself in the garb of the late Middle Ages, only to blow up stories, narrative, and even the sentence-by-sentence act of deduction that is reading a novel. And all of this nestled inside the setting of a world, the standard view of which is that it contained a stable and unified view of the cosmology, that is supposed to be hermetically unified as it gets. So hats off, Umberto.
I mean, as such, the novel contains a literary bomb in its core, disguising itself in the garb of the late Middle Ages, only to blow up stories, narrative, and even the sentence-by-sentence act of deduction that is reading a novel. And all of this nestled inside the setting of a world, the standard view of which is that it contained a stable and unified view of the cosmology, that is supposed to be hermetically unified as it gets. So hats off, Umberto.