Jesus never laughed…And so began a proposal woven into the fabric of Umberto Eco’s The name of the rosepart history lesson, part laughter exposition, exploring how such fun (laughter) could be a powerful weapon that should never must be given to the masses so that it does not free the masses, or more particularly the land-bound serf in the feudal system, from fear of the devil, which implies that the church controls the masses through fear and if that fear dissipates, so does the influence of the Church. Thus, a book about laughter is hidden and a mystery unfolds in which the reader is trapped, page after page after page.

This is the trademark of Umberto Eco, whom I met during college through the Foucault Pendulum. Then, and especially then, even with a bit of a college education (read: Philosophy 101) and an acquaintance, albeit fleeting and unimpressive, with some of the classics, namely, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faust, the Greek tragedies, the Song of Songs that Eco minutely quotes in his books (painfully for the reader), was hard reading. But there is a certain cadence, a certain rhythm to his style, and one can feel that he is trying to send a message that his display of arrogance is forgiven, even if it would make the reader feel that he is the “media”. lobotomized.” illiterate “to whom Eco refers in one of his books.

I would resume my relationship with Umberto Eco a decade later, when Dan Brown’s novels (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons) and The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason entered the best-seller lists. I just had to read what was advertised as the “Mother-of-all-mysteries-with-religious-overtones”, the forerunner of the great mystery books of our time that made people read again. It was this book.

The name of the rose it begins with a narrative by Adso of Melk, a monk, writing in the present about the thirteenth century. It was a story of, naturally (word of the author), a manuscript, a book that would generate stories and expositions about other books. A murder, compounded by other apocryphal murders, is committed to hide a book on laughter, which was supposed to be an interpretation or transcription of Coena Cypriani and Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics, her treatise on comedy, which was lost to the world. Thus began a quest to find a book and uncover its hidden secrets, a quest for knowledge (for knowledge’s sake?) that led the monks to take their own lives, and the lives of others, within the sepulchral sanctity of an inner labyrinth

If the reader were interested (or desperate), he would see a fine line despite (or perhaps because of) the discourses on matters of great concern during the period: the proliferation of heretics and their burning, a Pope by the name of John performing duties that were both ecclesiastical and secular, unheard of in light of today’s separation of church and state, the Fraticelli and the other sects practicing poverty, further fueling the discussion about whether and how Jesus was poor. this was wholly antithetical to the church’s accumulation of great wealth, interestingly but ambiguously discussed through didactic passages, elaborate arias, and lengthy recitatives that are left to the reader to decide for himself Jesus’ (or author’s) messages. ). Once the reader sees the fine line of what he believes to be the plot, he loses it once again. One of the characters explains the phenomenon: “I behaved stubbornly, pursuing an appearance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe… the order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to reach something. But afterwards, you have to throw away the ladder, because you discover that, although it was useful, it was pointless..” Effectively, Eco speaks a foreign language: mysterious, mystical, true. One must deduce the meaning from its meanings. This is quite an enviable trait for a writer because it draws the reader in, making him go through the lines not just once but twice. or three times until the meaning, real or imagined, is digested or understood or believed to be understood, which is crucial to the precious sanity of the reader.

Another mystery to be solved in this book is the title. Umberto Eco, fortunately, explains in his postscript that it is a misnomer; that he had nothing to do with the story, except that his novel needed to have a title (which made me laugh). He explains that he liked the use of the word “rose” because it is a symbolic figure, so rich in meaning that it almost has no meaning left. He further adds, by way of explanation, that Abelardo used the example of the sentence nulla rose is demonstrate how language can speak both of the non-existent and of the destroyed – that everything disappears into the void -, the true key to interpretation and the key to the masterful and proud ending of the characters in The Name of the Rose.

Umberto Eco tickles the imagination (but it would be horrified at the use of such a plebeian word), prompting the reader to endlessly study to arrive at an interpretation of his Latin maxims or of his seemingly obscure books and authors. But it is readable and endearing because he writes with a purpose: that by reading, the reader should have understood something else, become another person; that, by having fun, somehow, he has learned.