Volume 30, Number 12 · July 21, 1983
Murder in the Monastery?
By Richard Ellmann
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 502 pp., $15.95
Signs on a white field by Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician and now novelist as well, bring us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the year 1327. The preface would have us believe that in 1968 Eco was handed a translation, made in 1842 by a French abbé, of a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript by a Benedictine monk, one Adso of Melk. Adso has a horrible history to tell, of murderous doings ending in 'ecpyrosis' in a Benedictine monastery near the Apennines. These deeds are elaborately crisscrossed by the factions and schisms of the time. Eco would probably say that the structure is closed rather than open, as befits a medieval situation, and certainly his book hangs tightly and conclusively together. It is not the less strange for that.
Review, 1221 words
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