I try to read the Name of the Rose as Virginia Woolfe reads any book

I guess it’s sort of a poetic justice to have come across a trodden copy of this book. But it’s not a universal kind of poetic justice, not at the cosmic level, just something that relates to the content of the book that opens up in the labyrinthine map of the scriptorium of a medieval abbey.

A long, winded and erudite tale of books, The Name of the Rose is set in a time that belongs to the medieval ages, the age it’s written in, and simultaneously to today’s age that is rapidly evolving (read it as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).

Cover of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose

This historical fiction’s mysterious world takes you in at all levels, that you cannot even lift a finger out of its universe to check out what the time is outside. So many books came to mind while reading this, especially the Harry Potter books!

To be sure, Eco’s eduction as a medieval historian plays a grand part in creating the realisim of this fictional world and brings me back to the first instance of why I ever fell in love with literature. A wisdom that applies to your world and worldview.

He does this by creating maps, putting characters who speak different languages (something that caught my attention in the second part of Dune, which I felt lacked the linguistic depth and killed the mood of the movie by making so many of its characters speak plain English), by creating a prophecy, naming ancient characters like the basilisk, and not giving a cosmic meaning to the entire narrative ( so relatable to our current times where we can hardly make out the grand narrative).

Through years, through centuries, Eco’s book will remain relevant because it not only talks about philosophical lessons of life such as change, keeping tradition, the fear of a future and modernity ( it feels we are always on the brink of modernity but not quite, especially now) but also how each age fights its own traditions at the time while being modern in the future.