The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊
I first read this book about twenty years ago in my late teens, and I found it baffling, but oddly compelling. I had intended to re-read it when I'd achieved a more mature literary sensibility, but, realizing that day may never come, I gave up and re-read it now. The book is, in my view, a masterpiece. It's a murder mystery, a historical novel, an exegesis of Catholic theology, a fable, and a labyrinthine hallucination. More significantly it satisfyingly succeeds as all of those things by turns, and sometimes all of them at once. The book also makes the complex conceptual frameworks of 14th century Catholic orthodoxies and heterodoxies seem not only comprehensible, but compelling and vital. That capacity (making a complex alterity immediate and exciting) is one of the highest faculties of literature.
But perhaps my favorite part of the book was the postscript [said no one, ever], which was absent from the printing I read before, or perhaps I merely passed over it? The postscript opens with a disclaimer that the author has no business interpreting his book for the reader because the book and the reader must make their own separate peace, fairly standard "death of the author" material. The postscript then proceeds to go on for dozens of pages providing detail about the historical context, his writing process, his theory of the novel, his views of his characters, and his more general aesthetic commitments. His ideas are gorgeously fully formed and he tosses off epigrams like pistachio shells ("It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely"), but the postscript is also deeply sly and disingenuous. He denies he is offering any interpretation, while providing a huge store of intricate, carefully crafted extra-textual material. The postscript doesn't offer any explicit interpretive messages, but can only serve to provide clues which shape one's interpretation of the book. This tension is clearly intentional, and the postscript, in its meta-textual, self-referential enfolding is, possibly, the most Borgesian part of a book that is already an extended, self-conscious dialogue with Borges.
Truly exceptional, a desert island book. Recommended without qualification (also, read the postscript, I'm not joking).