Log

Mostly as an experiment, I decided to read Umberto Eco's first opus, The Name of the Rose, immediately after finishing Foucault's Pendulum, much as someone who is more-than-slightly drunk might perform a physical stunt and then, having not suffered any permanent damage, chooses to do it again out of sheer bravado, only this time with no hands!

The real challenge, I think, would be to read these two in the opposite order, since after slogging through Pendulum's morass, Name of the Rose felt like a lazy afternoon stroll.  While it suffers the same fundamental flaws as the Pendulum novel, Rose is, by my objective scientific measurement, roughly 2.8 times easier to read.

But make no mistake, the same flaws are indeed both present and unavoidable.  Rose exhibits the same penchant for extended bouts of rambling historical minutia drenched in turgid and esoteric language, and is thus incapable of getting out of its own way so it can just tell a damn story already.

The advantage goes to Name of the Rose, however, because that underlying (and under-served) story is itself so much more interesting and substantial, compared to the ramshackle mess in Pendulum.

Also, the characters here are much more inherently likable and (to my mind) capable of shouldering the plot, though the author might roll his eyes at my simpleton's preference for what are no doubt his less multidimensional creations.  But honestly, that's what he gets when he has us accompany a medieval Sherlock Holmes in one book while expecting us to empathize with a group of whiny and conceited fraudsters in the other.

In the end, though, if I managed to take something enjoyable away from the effort, I feel like it was in spite of the author's labor rather than because of it; like Eco had stumbled upon a sterling plot in a dusty attic somewhere and then proceeded to properly bugger the attempt to put it down on paper, unable or unwilling to keep his fetish for semiotic verbosity in check.  And I have to confess that I ventured into this book with a heavy predisposition to enjoy it, since I count the 1986 cinematic adaptation by Jean-Jacques Annaud among my favorite films of all time.

So, with two Eco novels under my belt, I'm perfectly content to move on and leave the rest of the good doctor's fictional work on the shelf.  Looking back on the endeavor, it feels like the literary equivalent of running a marathon just so that I could say that I had.  I admit to taking satisfaction at the accomplishment, but I never experienced any reader's high that compels me to continue what was otherwise a laborious and unpleasant activity.

Thus, with a tip of the hat, I bid Umberto Eco farewell in a fashion of his own favor, with a frustratingly untranslated bit of Latin:

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

(No, just kidding.  Dear reader, I will not recommit the sins that have been committed upon me.  It says: "Perhaps even these things will be good to remember one day.")

I can now truthfully claim to have read Foucault's Pendulum in its entirety.  This is no small feat, if the three false starts I suffered over the span of more than a decade are any indication.

About it I can say this: it expends over 500 pages of extremely dense, erudite esotericism for the purpose of staging a final moment that is poignantly depressing and quite possibly meaningless.

Also, the protagonist is not really the protagonist, but that hardly matters since the story is not really the point of the story (if there even is a point).

Something else of which I'm unsure is whether the good Dr. Eco is entirely aware of the irony of employing an impenetrably abstruse style of writing to deliver an indictment of impenetrably abstruse ideology.  I sincerely hope that he is, as that at least would lend a playfully sardonic aftertaste to the endeavor.  Otherwise, it's the pot calling the kettle black, since just about the only people capable of consuming the book without suffering the literary equivalent of compressive asphyxia are the handful of elite, linguaphile pedants roaming the halls of prestigious academic institutions, in whose company alone Eco no doubt considers himself among peers.