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/lit/ - Literature

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20402235 No.20402235 [Reply] [Original]

Just got done reading "The Name of the Rose" in the original italian (a special edition full of footnotes and endnotes and appendixes and a glossary and basically every little sentence was explained so I wouldn't miss anything).

It was meh.

After hearing so many people lavish it with praise and talk about how deep it was, I started to get the suspicion that it was another "high brow for low brow people" book. Like Donna Tartt's garbage. Unfortunately, it seems that (while better than Tartt's shit), my suspicion was correct. Eco manages to occasionally write a beautiful sentence, which is more than you can say about the virtual totality of authors of his level, but his themes are not layered at all (he basically bashes you over the head with them, repeatedly), his thriller whodunnit plot is convoluted and not that engaging, his style is either ok or cringeworthy when he decides to be pretentious (the word "locupletando" was essentially resurrected from the 18th century just so he could stick it in there and show off his scholarship, and the same is true for the INNUMERABLE, constant, and ultimately meaningless citations from ancient latin books, which don't really add anything and make the reading needlessly toilsome).
Worse, his characters sometimes behave in inconsistent ways. Spoilers:
Like young Adso, which in one chapter is obsessed with the girl he has sex with, a poor peasant forced to prostitute herself for a bit of food. Then he's torn with guilt at letting the inquisitors take her away to BURN HER ALIVE FOR SORCERY, an accusation that he knows is false, and then... nothing. He just never again thinks of her. No guilt, no trauma, she just disappears from his life story without leaving a mark.
Or what about the villain himself, blind Jorge, who preserves a book he loathes for DECADES because, as the librarian, he cannot bring himself to destroy a book... and then as soon as he's discovered, he destroys it by eating some pages and throwing the rest into the fire. But if he could do that, why the fuck didn't he do it from the beginning? Why keep that horrid book for decades and then hatching a complex plan to murder people who might read it? Completely inconsistent.

Overall, it doesn't deserve more than a 6/10.

>> No.20402237

filtered

>> No.20402242

>>20402237
No. If you can't distinguish between actually layered, deep writing and the pretentious citation-heavy garbage, you're the filtered one.
Shitwit.

>> No.20402257

>>20402237
Eco is the same guy who unironically said that conspiracy theories are always inevitably wrong because "either the conspiracy fails or it succeeds and then everyone discovers it".

Someone capable of seriously saying shit like that cannot filter anyone. You need to be straight up stupid to not see the flaw in that "logic".

>> No.20402304

>>20402235
>>20402242
>>20402257
/lit/tards coming off as real pseuds here. Latin used to be the standard for being a respectable person, but now it's pretentious because God forbid that I have to learn anything! God forbid that someone send me to the dictionary because a rare word! You are mentally weak midgets who can't suffer anything difficult because you're addicted to instant gratification and hate being reminded that you don't know everything.

>> No.20402312
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20402312

>>20402304
>filling almost every page of your book with long sentences or whole paragraphs in a dead language to look le cultured isn't pretentious
Show us your poetry half in latin and half in greek, underage faggot.

>> No.20402319

>>20402304
And here we have the perfect evidence that the diagnosis is correct: the low brow midwit comes out of the woodwork to defend his pseudo high brow garbage so he can keep feeling very well read and smart.
>"U-using words that have been obsolete for over a c-century and stuffing the narration with THOUSANDS of pointless citations in latin that add nothing to the book isn't p-p-pretentious!"
You will never be truly smart. You will never be truly cultured. You will forever be a midwit.

>> No.20402330

>>20402312
It only looks pretentious today because people are more retarded in general. But that's rich coming from you, since you are probably fluent in Italian if you can read Eco, but you still can't even put in the effort to learn Latin, another Romance language.

>> No.20402348

>>20402319
>Nooooo don't make me learn new words or Latin!!!
Your loss. Keep living in hell. Don't challenge yourself. Just keep reading Harry Potter and light novellas to bring up that count on goodreads.

>> No.20403025

>>20402235
It's pure kino. It's not supposed to be deep, it's all about form, athmosphere and story

>> No.20403049

>>20402348
Liberally making use of Latin quotes has no more of a special effect than quoting old SNL sketches and 1980s songs. Even today, Latin literature is probably the most entry-level part of "erudite" literature . It can be ok to use a few quotes or popular sayings for the sake of adding a bit of flavor to certain scenes or characters, but spreading them all throughout a book will make a reader bored and feel like the author's just trying to show off how much time they wasted on doing research using obscure books instead of fleshing out the characters and their environment further.
Even though readers may buy history books and read historical papers if they want to, if they want to read a novel, they do it because they want to see a fictional scenario depicted richly in verbal details before them, rather than a poorly conducted work of historical research with a pseudohistorical frame.

>> No.20404288

Eco was a hack.

/lit/ loves him because he's what the average /lit/erate wants to be: a pretentious namedropper who hides his lack of ideas and originality behind whole paragraphs in latin and regurgitated shallow philosophy, and for that is seen by normies as le amazingly cultured scholar.

"The name of the rose" was popular because normies bought it simply to brag about reading it. It's actually a very simple (even simplistic) book, under all those pointless latin citations. Nothing worth re-reading.

>> No.20404292

>>20402235
>It was meh.

You people are meh

>> No.20404293

>>20403049
>the author's just trying to show off how much time they wasted on doing research using obscure books instead of fleshing out the characters and their environment further.
Which is exactly what Eco did. See: >>20404288

>> No.20404303

>>20403025
>"Wow Eco is so deep!"
>"He isn't really deep at all."
>"I-it's not s-supposed to be d-deep!"
Ecofags remind me of Rooneyfags when they have to justify her shit by claiming that "but she didn't really believe what she made her characters say!" because her ideas are so retarded that it's the only way to justify them.

>> No.20404317
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20404317

>>20404292
NO U

Sorry that your boi is a pretentious hack with no depth and no real intelligence behind his latin quotes.

>> No.20404487

>>20402235
>a special edition full of footnotes and endnotes and appendixes and a glossary and basically every little sentence was explained so I wouldn't miss anything
>It was meh.
You're too dense to even read a fucking book without hand-holding, and you expect anyone to care what you think?
Go get your diapies changed

>> No.20404761

a prostitute (an actual one) of all people told me to read it
i didn't

>> No.20404958

Eco was born into a weird generation, and in all of his work there was a blend of the ancient and medievale alongside the postmodern and nihlistic. I'm not sure if he ever quite reconciled them.

>> No.20405275

Why do you faggots worry so exclusively about whether or not you can label something as deep? Is that the only dimension you can imagine using to value a book?
Never read Name of the Rose, but The Island of the Day Before was incredibly fun to read. It was funny and touching and pretty to read from beginning to end. I don't know how any of you can enjoy books at all if you do nothing while you read but keep score on whether they qualify as Deep Literature™ or not.

>> No.20405606

>>20402235
>It was meh
You have no taste

>> No.20406246

>>20404487
Imbecile. I chose that edition to make sure that I wouldn't miss "le hidden layered meaning", which you and your shitwit kind would've accused me of doing If I had chosen an edition without notes.

Disingenous, retarded piece of shit. Just accept that you're a shit for brains and you fell for a low brow book posing as high brow.

>> No.20406253

>>20405606
You have shit for brains. Nobody buys your "literate" posturing. Girls will keep not fucking you. Your peers will keep considering you a little cowardly, useless, talentless shit. And none of your posturing will ever change that.

>> No.20406256
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20406256

>>20405275
>y u guize want to read meaningful stuff instead of shit hehehehe
Eco fanboys are truly a special retarded breed. Maybe only rooneyfags are worse.

>> No.20406306

>>20406256
What kind of fanboy would only read one of his lesser works and then never pick up any of his other stuff?
You aren't talking about all this shit out of any desperate desire to read meaningful works, you just have the special kind of parasitic brainworm that convinces you high art is about achieving a high score on your imaginary metrics.

>> No.20407390

he seems to show up regularly as a go-to journalist for seethe pieces against "fascism". good example kvetching about the Protocols and Evola
>https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/aug/17/society.umbertoeco

>> No.20407432

It was a good book, but it wasn't an important piece of literature or anything. There are no ideas or themes that really matter within it. It was just good kino reading for fun

>> No.20407598

>>20405275
If people treated it as something comparable to The Da Vinci Code or Tintin comics instead of as a great work of historical fiction, then nobody would have a problem with it.
The problem lies with people who think that "muh philosophy" references makes stuff deeper.

>> No.20408314

>>20405275
>The Island of the Day Before was incredibly fun to read. It was funny and touching and pretty to read from beginning to end.

My nigga. It's one of my favourite novels.