Adso’s original text is the story itself: the mysterious saga of seven deaths in 1327, which he witnessed firsthand in his youth while shadowing his master - our detective - William of Baskerville. This book was Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, Vallet’s 1842 French translation of a Latin text written by an aging monk, Adso of Melk, in 14th-century Italy. Eco has merely translated and titled a book given to him in 1968 by someone named Abbé Vallet.
In the opening pages we learn that The Name of the Rose is not actually a novel written by Umberto Eco. Your typical murder mystery starts with a bang, but this one starts with a fake history lesson. The Name of the Rose is obsessive in a lot of ways, beginning with its own credibility. Its first priority - far above entertaining the reader or advancing the plot - is to situate itself perfectly in history, to merge so cleanly with the past that the reader can’t see the seams. It does not have the pace of a murder mystery and that’s because it’s actually much more of a historical novel than anything else. The Name of the Rose is plodding and complex. That’s what I was expecting when I picked up Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: an older, more erudite sibling of The Da Vinci Code: a mass-market page-turner. Follow along as William races against time to crack the case! Dangerous knowledge and the future of the Catholic Church hang in the balance. In this 14th-century thriller, every death exposes a new piece of an age-old conspiracy. When a string of strange deaths plagues a wealthy Italian abbey, Brother William of Baskerville is called to unravel the mystery.
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