The Name of the Rose

A few months ago, the company I work for had a beta-launch for this new social networking website. Every employee was required to sign up, and soon enough, everyone was busy making testimonials for everyone else. I suspect our office took a productivity hit during that period.

Anyway, my friend and then-officemate Wanggo, who would hopefully be contributing to this space soon, was getting tired of making witty write-ups for everyone, so he proceeded to give the rest of us one-word testimonials. When I opened mine up, it read, Erudite.

At the time, I had no idea what the word meant, so it was only when I looked the word up in the dictionary did the irony of what just happened dawn on me.

It was a good thing then that I already knew what the word meant when I picked up I read The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco's international bestseller. Erudite is the perfect word to describe the book.

(A friend described another Eco book, Foucault's Pendulum, a "cerebral Dan Brown," which is probably fair, if you add, "Yeah, like a million times more.")

I suspect that Rose is one of those books that are read far fewer times than they are claimed to have been. To summarize quickly, it is a philosophical detective story set in an Italian monastery in the middle ages.

Now read that sentence again, and think about how ridiculous that sounds.

But Eco surprisingly pulls it off. Sure, there are parts that are hard to digest, but there are moments when I can't put the novel down. The book is a showcase not just for Eco's brilliant philosophical mind, but his remarkable ability to do an exciting facsimile of an Arthur Conan Doyle plot.

Postscript: I wasn't aware that there was a film based on the book as I was reading it, but all the while, I was imagining William as a Sean Connery-type. I wasn't that surprised when I found out that Connery did play him in the movie.