Finally, something off my "snobby intellectual books" stack

[dragojustine]

Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

 

This is something else.  Is it a murder mystery?  Historical fiction?  An apocalypse allegory?  A theology musing?  A semiotics treatise?  Damned if I know.  Maybe one day I’ll be smart enough to understand this book; in the meantime, I’m just in awe.  Eco plays with metatextuality in his, what, four different framing narratives.  William of Baskerville is an amalgam of Occam and Holmes, and works beautifully as such.  He is the mouthpiece for fascinating speculation on knowledge, what we can know, how to interpret signs, whether truth can be found.  I have no words for the awesomeness of this book.