This is another book that I have surprisingly not read until recently. And this is despite the fact that I am an Umberto Eco fan, and have read most of his other books---but I had not read this book, his first novel, and still probably the most popular. My edition, an English translation published in 1984, has a quote on the back to the effect that Umberto Eco had written his first novel! It is hard to imagine, now, an audience surprised by that one Italian semiotician writing a novel, but at one point, Eco was more known as a literary critic than a writer of experimental (but action-packed) novels. And I read this book backwards: I had already read Foucault's Pendulum and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana before I read it, so it seemed slightly more tame, linear and less "meta" than his later works. But for readers at the time, it was probably quite a surprise!
The Name of the Rose is set in a medieval monastery, with the main characters all being monks of different
…