Umberto Eco is an author who has been on my radar for positively decades now, and I decided to start not with the far more famous The Name of the Rose (1980, trans. 1986) but instead the Middle Ages-set, wandering storyteller tome Baudolino (2000, trans. 2002) because, well, it’s probably not a common starting point (yes, I am contrary; it has been noted). So imagine my frank surprise and delight when about 300 pages in it suddenly — after lots of vignettes and philosophical off-shoots about, crikey, all manner of things — transformed into a legit locked room mystery.
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I is staying at a castle, and sleeping in a bedroom which is inspected at great length by his faithful entourage (who will be spending the night sleeping outside his door) to ensure his safety: the flue of the fireplace “narrowed almost immediately, allowing no room for the passage of a human being”, and his “defecation cubbyhole” is safe as “nobody could have climbed up from the bottom of the pit” (a quite horrible image, frankly…). They taste his water, check his pillow for poison, and even give him a panacea for all possible poisons which one of the simpering nudniks samples to ensure that it has not itself been replaced with poison.
Then, well:
They went out. Frederick drew the leaves of the door closed, and they heard the click of the latch. They stretched out on the surrounding benches.
What I immediately missed is that the “click of the latch” is actually the drawing of a bolt on the inside of the door, locking it against all intrusion. And, of course, in the morning they find him dead, without a mark on him, having drunk the elixir that was intended to save him, evidently having been poisoned and unable to reach the antidote in time…but, of course, no-one could have gotten in to administer the poison.
Duhn-duhn and indeed duuuuuuuhn.
Now, this comes pretty much completely out of nowhere in the narrative; I even read the chapter in question twice so that I was certain of what I was getting. Yes, some politicking makes his position anywhere subject to attempts on his life, but this locked room murder suddenly descends like manna from heaven and our erstwhile Mediaeval folly transforms into something more interesting and possibly a lot darker. For, of course, those present have the stain of the emperor’s death on them, and inevitably doubts arise and accusations start to fly. Throw in the vanishing of a disputed religious artefact and it’s all systems go for a bit of intrigue in the middle of this romp. Everything gears up nicely for a but of sturm und drang detection and the tying in of the various threads that have been explored thus far.
Which lasts for about, oooh, six pages. Then folly and wandering abounds, some shenanigans are had, and I was inclined to believe that the case for Frederick’s death being some natural cause that Eco put forward was actually what killed him: the impossibility was a bit of an accident, thrown in to spice up a chapter. Honestly, the book is so scattershot in its focus that this could legitimately be the case. Eco writes very well, and the translation by William Weaver reads very easily indeed, but if I did as little work as Eco’s editor appears to have done here…well, I’d be as good as retired.
“Yes, Umberto, I’m reading it now. Magnifico!“
The Invisible Event 
Not read this one in sny language but my Dad may have- Eco was clearly a genre fan. Interesting but if semiotics are not one’s bag …
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Hmm not sure this is one for me, I’ve kind have been put off doorstop size mystery novels, as invariably once you’ve waded past all the excess padding (which is not always that interesting), the mystery itself is a bit disappointing. No Eco for me I fear.
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The mystery element is distinctly in the minority here — it doesn’t qualify as a doorstep mystery novel so much as just a doorstep novel; I thought I was taking a genre break!
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“…if it’s not one of the hidden gems of the genre (sorry, TomCat)”
Oh, well, you can’t win them all and I’ll probably give this one a pass as well. However, I do want to try The Name of the Rose one of these days.
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You and me both; I’ve sen the movie, which is how I came to know of it, and I here the book is very good (if rater long on description…). One of these days, for sure.
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I did read The Name of the Rose many years ago. Oh wait, that auto-corrected . . .
I did read The Name of the Rose for many years. It was terribly long, and you can derive more enjoyment watching the movie. Sean Connery and Christian Slater were marvelous.
That’s a great picture of Elizabeth George’s editor . . .
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I think that’s actually Patricia Cornwell’s editor — the one who died and no one noticed for three years?
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I managed to complete ‘Name of the Rose’, and found that it took slightly too long to get to the end. It read like a fair-play mystery for most of it, padded with plenty of medieval philosophical discourses, right up till the end – if I recall correctly, the resolution was certainly hinted at, but not especially clued? I think my first foray into Eco made me shy away from his other novels. They came across more as postmodern meditations on mysteries rather than mystery novels.
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This feels like that but with the proportions reversed: there’s even more philosiphy, even more padding, and about fifteen pages of mystery (a mere 3% of the book).
The idea of post-modern mediatation is an interesting one: the false solutions here are built around some key debates in the precise existence of certain states or things (there’s a lot of discussion about vacuums herein), and it’s this free-form association of ideas that would make Eco an interesting detective writer if he ever chose to give it a go.
He has that perspective on the various threads of discussion that work so well in classic mystery, how one idea can link quite easily to something seemingly unrelated. But, yeah, in anything post-1960 that does feel rather more like someone being clever-clever than someone trying to write a genuinely confounding mystery plot.
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Apparently Eco liked locked rooms, so a lot of his novels tend to have minor ones like this, from what I understand. Might just have been this and The Name of the Rose, however, I haven’t read his stuff.
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My copy is back in the librry now, but I seem to remember the biography saying that he’s only written like three novels. Of course, this would have been back in 2002, so maybe he’s turned into the James Patterson of Philosophical Mysteries since then…
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I believe he wrote seven novels. He died last year.
THE NAME OF THE ROSE is worth reading.
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Didn’t realise he was dead; oh, well, I guess he’s unlikely to take me up on the challenge of a 500-page impossible crime meisterwerk, then.
Upon research, he did indeed write seven novels. Three of them came after Baudolino, so it would be interesting to know if any others contained impossible or detective elements…
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On the whole I despise postmodernism and all its associated claptrap. I make an exception for Eco. He had a genuine sense of fun. And I think he had a genuine fondness for genre fiction.
Don’t attempt FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM unless you have a very high tolerance for intellectual game-playing. THE NAME OF THE ROSE though is more disciplines and thoroughly entertaining.
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Cool, thank-you. I shall return to ItNotR at some point, I’m sure, and am pleased to hear it’s good — reports tend to vary, but I reckon with more focus Eco could do something very, very good indeed.
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Did you ever get round to “The Name of the Rose”? It’s my favourite novel, so I could wax lyrical about it for days. It’s an absolute masterpiece of atmosphere and a very interesting murder mystery too, but I think very few people talk about just how funny it is. The monks acting like a high school debate team, arguing endlessly about whether Devil-worshippers kiss the rectums of chicken and whether Jesus was really poor until they eventually come to blows is a highlight of the book, for sure.
Unlike “Baudolino”, “The Name of the Rose” equally balances the philosophy and the mystery, the metatextuality and the pure boy’s own adventure tone of it all. I wouldn’t call it a GAD-like fair play book though. The fact that the protagonist is named William of Baskerville should give you a good clue of the type of mystery Eco is aiming for. And I’d say he’s very successful. He nails the spookiness and the excitement of Doyle’s writing superbly. He also homages quite heavily a certain Argentinian writer whose works I also love (hint: the blind librarian’s name in the book is Jorge of Borges). Not to mention that the book has maybe my favourite method of murder ever, and a few solid impossible mysteries to boot (though they get resolves rather quickly).
I know a lot of readers struggle with the density of Eco’s books. He used to joke that the first 100 pages of his novels are a penance to separate worthy readers from the casual ones. Personally, I find his style of writing meditative and in service of the atmosphere-building. Also, the stuff he writes about is undeniably interesting. It’s not like he loads his books with hundreds of pages of weather reports. There are several incidental anecdotes in “The Name of the Rose” I still think of quite fondly.
I do have a major gripe with the English-language publications of “The Name of the Rose”, however. They don’t include translations for the Latin sections of which there are many! Sure, they’re not exactly key for following the plot, but you’ll miss so many beautiful quotations and witty dialogues. My Yugoslav edition includes about 50 pages of endnotes with all the translations and several historical explanations. These were later published in English as a separate book called “The Key to the Name of the Rose” and I’d suggest having it by your side as you read.
As for the other Eco books. If you love mathematical philosphy, you’ll love “Foucault’s Pendulum”. Hell, I don’t like maths at all and I love that book. It’s extremely dense, sure, and I’d never recommend it for a first-time Eco reader, but it’s very funny and has a devilish plot revolving entirely around apophenia which is something I find extremely fascinating. “The Island of the Day Before” is more like “Baudolino” in that it’s a philosophical adventure book with loads of history and philosophy. It’s very Jules Verne. “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” I read many, many years ago so I don’t really remember it very well, but I remember it being like an Arturo Perez-Reverte novel, if that means anything. A mystery-fueled adventure book through historical mansucripts and pop culture. “The Prague Cemetery” is a Dumas-homage, a sprawling conspiracy thriller about an impish villain causing havoc through time with his evil forgeries. Finally, “Numero Zero” is a Dan Brown spoof with a conspiracy plot revolving around WWII Italy. It’s very short and rather forgettable, but fun for a seasoned Eco fan with nothing left to read.
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I didn’t yet get to The Name of the Rose, no, but I really appreciate these directions, because Eco is certainly someone on my radar for future.
I’ve realised recently that I tend to lose patience with long, slow books, and I think it’s in part because I feel such a press to write three posts and week and so — usually — read at least three books over the same period (this month’s Adventures in Self-Publishing saw me read about 8 books so that I could write four reviews of the good ones). There’s definitely an endgame in mind, as I sincerely doubt this blog will still be going ten years from now, so at that point I’m hoping I’ll have more time and thus more patience for longer books that reward one’s attention a little more.
The bugger of it is that I used to really love getting lost in a long book, so I very much look forward to this again in due course. Just have to hope my eye sight doesn’t fail before I get there again 🙂
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I’ll be very sorry to see you go, but if it leads you to bigger (not necessarily better, though) books, then it’ll all be worth it 😀
If you feel the three-times-a-week schedule is hurting your attention span, maybe you should consider scaling it back. Still, I think most people nowadays are experiencing some form of attention span loss. I avoid most social media and short form content, but I’m feeling it too. I used to sit down and watch as many movies as a day could contain, nowadays I struggle with two-a-day.
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Thankfully it’s not an attention span thing (yet!) — more that a longer book takes longer to read, and I often feel (self-imposed) pressure to be getting through books quickly so that I can keep up the posting rate I require here.
It’s absolutely a problem of my making, and let’s not pretend that this blog is successful enough to justify it, so at some point I’ll inevitably cut back. Precisely when remains to be seen…!
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