Murray Abraham, and well-known French actor Michael Lonsdale. Jean-Jacques Annaud directed bonafide international superstar Sean Connery, Oscar-winner F. Yet in 1986, just six years after The Name of the Rose hit bookshelves, the movie version hit theaters, and in a big way. Many books have been called “unfilmable” only to be translated into highly successful movies (see The Lord of the Rings), but rarely does the word seem more apt than in the case of Eco’s cerebral oddities. Whole chapters in Eco’s grander and more experimental second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, essentially consist of bullet-point lists of secret societies and their famous initiates. The effect of Eco’s writing is like a welling up of deeply buried memories and things that we never knew in this life but feel instinctively that we should know, because our remote ancestors knew them and feared them. It is a long passage in which Eco rattles off the names of beasts of yore, few of them familiar today, but many of them half-familiar, like echoes from our collective human memory. In his debut novel The Name of the Rose, about a series of murders at a 14th-century Italian monastery, Eco describes a grotesque tableau chiseled into the frame of a church doorway. The defining feature of an Eco novel is the list of arcane trivia. Eco, perhaps uncharitably, dismissed Brown as “one of my creatures.”Įco’s books feature danger and death and mayhem, but generally they are light on plot and heavy on atmosphere, making them unlikely sources for film adaptations. It’s demanding reading Dan Brown’s savvy twist on Eco’s medieval thriller format was to make it accessible to a broader audience, but this came at the cost of Eco’s incredible specificity.

Beginning in the 1980s he took “weird fiction” and added footnotes, turning it into a respectable art form.

An Italian semiotician (someone who studies symbols), Eco carries in his balding, bearded, bespectacled head an encyclopedic knowledge of Kabbalah, metaphysics, the Knights Templar, 19 th century occultists – every esoteric spiritualist movement and every weird avenue to enlightenment ever dreamed up in an opium den. And if you haven’t seen the meticulous film adaptation of his best-selling work Il nome della rosa ( The Name of the Rose), you’re missing what may be Sean Connery‘s most mature and underappreciated performance.īefore there was Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code, there was Eco. If you’ve never read a novel by Umberto Eco, take it from me: you’re missing out on one of life’s most bizarre but rewarding experiences.

The name of the rose novel