The Name of the Rose

"It is. I’m pushing the definition. It’s a country monastery, to be more precise, and we are going way back in time to the 14th century. The book is set in a remote Italian abbey up in the mountains, where a series of dreadful, religiously-inspired murders take place. Your detective in this case is William of Baskerville; the name is a reference to ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles.’ This is a very serious novel. It’s quite thrilling, but it has a lot of theoretical and philosophical thought in it. A lot of the book is about medieval church politics. So it’s fascinating. There are arguments about heresies and whether or not Jesus owned the shoes that he wore—which, actually, wars have been fought over, because if Jesus had possessions, the Pope could be a rich man, basically. Your hero, William of Baskerville, is a brilliantly deductive English monk. He’s a little bit arrogant, a bit pompous. That’s his only failing. He’s a very attractive figure. It’s a book I’ve read more than any other book in my life. Probably five time? And I’ve seen the film, the TV series, listened to the audiobook… It’s an astonishing work of philosophy and an exciting thriller."

"I first encountered the book in my friend, the great German producer, Bernd Eichinger’s production of the film of the same name —directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Essentially the book is a a whodunnit set in a medieval monastery. It’s a meeting of worlds. A fairly simple, but gripping detective story is the excuse for a freewheeling wander through and exploration of much more complex subjects like medieval philosophy, religious dogma, and semiotics, all based within a meticulously researched and recreated 14th-century Italian monastery. This is a sophisticated and beautifully investigated novel that draws on detective fiction traditions like Sherlock Holmes —the main protagonist is called William of Baskerville—to examine hypocrisy and corruption within the Catholic faith. Taking the lid off the shenanigans of Papists is always a good idea. I used to be structuralist, but now I’m not Saussure. It’s an old one. If Ferdinand de Saussure is considered the father of semiotics, then for sure Eco was a disciple who moved beyond his linguistic focus looking at a more dynamic and culturally-bound approach to signs. One of my favourite authors and Eco’s favourites too was Anthony Burgess . They met when Burgess was living in Rome in the early 1970s. Eco, who worked as a radio producer, interviewed Burgess in connection with Joysprick , a book about the semiotics of James Joyce. Burgess was an incredible polymath known for his work as a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, translator, and critic. He is not known for his historical fiction so much, hence not mentioned as such here, but his prolific career also included dozens of other novels, nonfiction books, symphonies, and thousands of other musical compositions and articles. Burgess experienced the blossoming of the Modernist movement and the emergence of a post-war or Postmodern culture. All the arts informed the work of this great writer – in much the same way as Eco – whose focus outside of literature was more academic and philosophical who wrote influential non-fiction works, essays, and newspaper columns on topics such as semiotics, literary theory, and cultural criticism. In the same way Burgess was a prolific composer and considered music a core part of his identity. He wrote over 250 musical works and was also a translator of operas and plays like Carmen and Oedipus Rex . The quintessential uomo universale. Novels and novelists are all over the film business. As a filmmaker I have worked with writers like James Ellroy, Gunter Grass, Colm Tóibín, Iain Banks, Thomas Keneally, Lee Hall, and David Grossmann – and my most recent film, which has just become the Polish Oscar candidate, is a biopic of Franz Kafka, Franz , directed by Agnieszka Holland. So, the two things in my life are entirely bound up in each other – almost inseparable. As a producer, I am often optioning novels, and then bringing on the writers and the directors afterwards, so there is a symbiotic relationship between director, writer and producer – the Holy Trinity. When a book is being adapted for the screen, creative liberties are exercised and with them, the originality of the book may witness a certain extent of cinematic twist. Some books, like The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, could actually stand as the screenplay of the film – they are so close. For me, the one thing people seem to forget when comparing movies to the books they are based on, is that movies are designed to be experienced in one sitting, while most books are read at one’s own pace over time."

"It’s so interesting that it did so well, isn’t it? It’s set in Italy in a monastery. Eco makes interesting demands on his reader. There’s a lot of philosophy , theories of knowledge. I find it very, very heartening that so many people have taken the time to read this complicated book. And I think the reason it’s been so popular is that he did this really genius thing of putting together a very complex field—semiotics or sign theory—with detective fiction, because those two things are essentially the same thing. What do clues tell you? When you have a sign, which could be a footprint, what does that footprint tell you? What can you deduce from it? What assumptions are you making that don’t quite work? It’s a real page-turner. There are red herrings, different suspects, false leads. You’re very excited and interested to find out what’s happening. That is set against lots of discussions about how we can read signs, how we can we think about knowledge, about different kinds of heresy, different modes of belief. He puts quite complicated philosophical, religious and theological thought into his book, almost by sleight of hand. It’s so clever. The other thing that makes the book so appealing is the way that he describes setting. You get so rooted in the world of the monastery, the world of the library where there’s this secret book. It’s immersive. You really feel like you’re in those shadowy corridors, you want to get into these secret spaces, and he holds you back. You really are with the characters because his descriptions are so powerful. It’s fiction, so it’s making us question the status of this text. It’s actually a very medieval thing to do, giving a fake authority, pretending that you’ve got this source from somewhere when really it’s from somewhere else. He’s not trying to trick us. He’s trying to set up an ambiguity around the text, to say, ‘Does anything really have an origin? Can we believe signs? What do they really refer to? Is everything a copy, a version of something? Can we ever actually get to the thing itself?’ He’s making that same point about sign theory over and over again. I think it’d be very hard not to involve it in some way, just because it’s part of the fabric of people’s lives. The Name of the Rose is set in a monastery. Pilgrims is set on a pilgrimage. You can have books about the Middle Ages which aren’t so profoundly set in a religious context, but you can’t really ignore it. Say, The Invention of Fire , which we haven’t talked about yet: although religion is there in the background, it’s not really about religion. I suppose there are still references to religious characters, so religion is involved, but it is not central."

"I read this a few years ago and it was one of those books you always remember because it creates a whole new way of thinking. I had no idea at the time that the medieval mindset was any different to the modern one. It is about the adventure of a Franciscan friar and his novice in medieval Italy and it is part murder mystery, part game with semiotics and medieval knowledge. At university I read lots of French books referring to this medieval period where all knowledge was supposed to be classified, and re-classified and super-classified, and it became sort of idiotic, this academic approach that these monks had. Yet there was something amazing about this belief that you could classify knowledge. It’s also very good storytelling, but the part I remember was the sort of library filled with knowledge and these games, which teased you with knowing things and not knowing things. It’s just this very complex mindset that’s really different from our own and because I knew nothing about it, it was just terribly exciting to be taken off into this world. I must say that I have tried to read a couple of other books by Umberto Eco and found them quite difficult, so I think he was reaching out to the world of fiction . There was an interesting book that I read recently by him about art and beauty in the Middle Ages , but it was so much more an academic book. I think The Name of the Rose crosses boundaries in a way that others don’t."