About the book:
A medieval monk and his novice investigate a series of deaths in an Italian abbey, and the mystery leads into the labyrinthine library at its heart a repository of forbidden knowledge and the site of a conspiracy reaching back to Aristotle.
Eco uses the detective novel as a frame for a dense and erudite exploration of semiotics, heresy, and the power of texts.
One of the most intellectually rich popular novels ever written, and genuinely gripping as a mystery.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Some wear on cover.
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About the author:
Umberto Eco (1932 to 2016)
Born in Alessandria in northern Italy, Eco spent the first half of his career becoming one of the most formidably learned academics of the twentieth century a medievalist, philosopher, and semiotician whose theoretical work on signs, meaning, and interpretation was internationally influential before most people had heard of him as a novelist. He wrote his first work of fiction at forty-eight. It sold ten million copies.
His influences are Borges above all the labyrinthine library, the infinite text, the detective story as a model for how we know anything and Joyce in the encyclopedic ambition, Aquinas in the medieval philosophical architecture, and Conan Doyle in the pleasure of detection. The blind monk Jorge of Burgos in The Name of the Rose is a direct homage to Borges, named and positioned deliberately. Eco owed the debt and paid it openly.
His academic work particularly The Open Work and The Role of the Reader argued that a text's meaning is completed by its reader rather than fixed by its author, which is both a theoretical position and a description of how his novels actually function: they reward whatever the reader brings, and punish nothing except incuriosity.
The intellectual thriller as a genre the labyrinthine archive, the hidden manuscript, the conspiracy behind history owes its contemporary existence largely to him. Dan Brown built an industry on a simplified version of Foucault's Pendulum. Eco noted, with characteristic precision, that he had already described the type of person who would believe it.
He died in Milan in February 2016, in a house reportedly containing thirty thousand books. It is not clear where he slept.
