Today I figured I’d try to read through The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco, and am currently about ~60pgs. I feel profoundly dumb. To lay out my bonafides, last year I got a little under halfway through Foucault’s Pendulum before tapping out because I found the plot too meandering and felt that I had more or less ‘got’ what Eco was getting at. Conspiracy theories bad, and a conspiratorial mindset can connect pretty much anything to anything else. Or something like that.
I can appreciate that Eco is clearly a very intelligent guy, but his prose and characters aren’t (from what I’ve read) particularly affecting. I don’t feel much emotional connection to any of them, and the dialogue often feels at least a little stilted.
This far in TNoTR, I feel pretty lost in terms of context. Without a passing knowledge in monastic and theological schisms in the fourteenth century, I don’t have much of a grasp on the theological and political background context which the novel is steeped in. It makes it pretty difficult to orient myself with what’s going on and what the stakes are.
What doesn’t help are the sections of untranslated Latin. I get it, Eco, you can understand Latin, very cool – please get on with the story. It also doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me because (ostensibly) I’m reading William Weaver’s english translation of Umberto Eco’s Italian translation of a fictitious neo-gothic French book by Abbé Vallet which is itself a translation of Adso of Melk’s manuscript which was written *in Latin*. So within the framing device, I struggle to understand *why* there’d be untranslated Latin. I’m sure I can gloss the meaning from context, but if the Latin is so inconsequential, WHY INCLUDE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I just…I don’t know, guys. I want to like Umberto Eco, I want to enjoy his novels, but whenever I read them I feel profoundly bored and profoundly stupid. The primary emotion they elicit is frustration: at the text and at myself for not “getting” it. It’s not like I *can’t* enjoy difficult texts, Book of The New Sun and Moby-Dick are two of my favourite books Maybe my inability to makes me moron with utterly plebian tastes, but I just don’t get what I’m missing here.
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by jaythejayjay
1 Comment
Pretty sure that untranslated latin is supposed to make you feel uncounfortable or out of place. It’s the same strategy movies use when they put a character talking in a different language than the rest without subtitles.