The Name of the Rose - by Umberto Eco - Book Review

This 1980s classic is among the bestselling books of all times, having sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. I, however, came to know of it only this month, when a friend mentioned it in a casual WhatsApp chat.  

But for her serendipitous remark, I would have remained nescient to the terrible story of Adso of Melk, a Benedictine novice monk, and his mentor William of Baskerville, a Franciscan Friar, who also happens to be a semiotician (an expert in signs and symbols), their direful travel together in the winter of the year 1327 to a remote, medieval abbey somewhere in Northern Italy, to attend a theosophical disputation between factions of the Christian church, where, upon reaching, William is asked by the abbot, to investigate the mysterious death of a monk the previous day, who as it turns out is only the first of the series of victims who will die before the week is up. 

So, at the first and most explicit level, it is a whodunnit murder mystery novel, where Brother William plays the detective, and he is expected to use his acclaimed, astute observational and syllogistic skills, to find the murderer, his character redolent of Sherlock Holmes - note the deliberate choice of 'Baskerville' in his name, shadowed by Adso, as does Watson to Holmes. The confines of a secluded abbey, characters who have secrets to keep and pasts to hide, illicit love and jealousies, a library which no one is allowed to enter, a labyrinth which is indecipherable, secret entrances to vaults with inestimable riches, deaths which seem to follow a preordained sequence set in the 'John's book of revelations'- are all ingredients which fill the cornucopia from which this nice, juicy, mystery story may be partaken.  

However the author, Umberto Eco, uses the above theme of the story only to keep the reader's interest riveted, and to bind together the next level of his narrative, which centres around theosophical and religious matters. Several chapters are devoted to ecclesiastical discussions between the characters on whether Jesus laughed or not, on the impending arrival of Antichrist, on the 'poverty of Christ' and on what constitutes 'heresy' - topics which were hotly contested in the late medieval era, the heat of such contestations being enough for deep schisms and fragmentation of the Church, distancing the papal clergy (who owned large estates property and riches) from sects like Franciscans, Fraticelli and Dulcinians who believed in renouncing personal possessions and living in poverty, leading to declarations of the 'heresy' against the latter groups, with the heretics convicted at motivated inquisitions being tortured or burnt at the stake. Yeah, this stuff got real, man.  

But at the highest level the book's narrative is really about the varying approaches to 'truth'- in particular the truth defining the infallibility of 'God's word in the scriptures'. It's about 'reasoned doubt' vs 'dogma'.  It's about 'discovering the new vs protecting the ancient'.  It’s about Aristotle vs Aquinas.

Near the end of the book, when it's time for William to ruefully look back at the events in the story, he says to Adso: 

"Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."

and then goes on to add

"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”

For us, living in the current century, having been brought up on thoughts based on post-enlightenment science, these appear to be debates of the medieval area which have long been 'settled'. Yet in various forms, shapes, and intensities these issues keep recurring in our societies. So despite the author's own assertion in the preface that "...it is a tale of books, not of everyday worries...", I feel there is a relevance of the story even today.  

This review cannot be complete if I don't mention the narrative style of the book. The metanarrative style used in the book, admits to doubts about the veracity of the events which are described. In the preamble itself, the author explains to the readers that the story he is about to describe, comes from the transcriptions he made while reading the French version of a published memoirs of Adso (which he unfortunately irretrievably loses), but later in further research and discussions with scholars, he is told that no such book was ever published. Thinking that it might have been a forgery, he drops the idea of writing the book, till couple of years later, he finds the same story repeated in a totally unconnected manuscript in South America. Though still beset with doubts, he decides to recount the story as 'The Name of the Rose'. Why does the author describe all this to the reader? There does not seem to be any need to do so. No reason, unless right from the outset he wants to orient the reader's mind on the tension which exists between 'doubt' and 'truth', which the story gravitates towards.

Let truth be told. It's not quite the bedtime story one would like to curl up with on a rainy night. The writing style is very pedantic and the language is verbose at times. But to be fair to the author, he gives early warning signals about what to expect. Not too many pages down from the beginning of the book, when Adso reaches the abbey and enters the church for the first time, and he sees a carved tympanum above the doorway, the author doesn't allow him to go through till he has used him to give the reader a 2152 word description (I counted) of the carving.  If the reader passes this test of patience (and hopefully finds it fascinating) he is primed to digest the lengthy discourses on Christianity and enjoy Adso's description of his bizarre dream which lasts for a full chapter. The sentences are long and concatenated by an endless series of commas, with frequent use of words which lie outside the limits of my vocabulary (a style which I have tried to playfully imitate in this review).

If you are still not one of the 50 million people who have read the book, put it down in your don’t-die-before-reading-it-list.

My rating : 4 Stars.

When Nietzsche Wept - by Irvin Yalom - Book Review

To recommend a book with a heavy sounding title like 'When Nietzsche Wept', is a difficult task. I am sure most of my Indian friends would neither find the title appealing nor relate to it. A more intriguing title would have been : 'Whisky Sour of the Mind'. I'll explain why later in this piece, but for the moment, let’s stick with the original.

Most Indians don't relate to Nietzsche for several reasons, commencing with them having to check the spelling and also the pronunciation of his name (knee-च).  

His anti-religionist, sceptic stance ("God is Dead"),  directed against the Christian concepts of Good and Evil, does not resonate with the Indian psyche brought up on Hindu ambivalence of Dharma. His thoughts like 'Eternal Recurrence' (there is only one life which just goes on recurring ad-infinitum) are antithetical to Hindu belief of many lives which can change as per your karma. 

The shameless misappropriation and deliberate misinterpretation of his thoughts by the Nazis to justify their ideology, is off-putting. This also discouraged the British from planting his seeds in the minds of the English speaking intelligentsia during the Raj. Post independence the liberal intellectuals who drove the awareness of western philosophy in Indian Universities were more comfortable with Marx, Kant and Bentham. So Nietzsche in India, was left to be discovered  only by a few bibliophiles, most of who started and stopped their excursion with "Thus Spake Zarathustra". 

This preamble, in this review was necessary to bring out why I too, like most Indians, know very little of Nietzschean philosophy and yet after reading just this one book can sound intelligent about it. Now onto the book itself.

Irvin Yalom, the author, is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and has written several fiction and non-fiction books. Given his academic background he calls this book a 'teaching novel'.  It's a historical fiction novel - a story of historical characters that could very well have happened but didn't.  The bulk of the novel consists of dramatised conversations between Nietzsche with Josef Breuer, another great mind in nineteenth century Europe and a distinguished physician of Vienna, who laid the foundation of psychotherapy ('talking cure'), which was later developed by his protégé Sigmund Freud. 

In the story, Breuer meets an estranged close young friend of Nietzsche, Lou Salome who says that Nietzsche is in mental despair because of his chronic migraine and is contemplating suicide. She wants Breuer to treat his mental condition using the 'talking cure' method that he used recently on another patient called 'Anna O'. She makes a further stipulation that, since Nietzsche will never knowingly accept it, Breuer must treat him without letting on that he is doing so. Persuaded more by the feminine charms of Lou Salome, rather than any conviction in his ability to help Nietzsche, Breur accepts the challenge. Lou then almost entirely retreats from the story. 

What follows is interesting intellectual sparring between Nietzsche and Breuer before they arrive at an understanding. This is where the book really warms up. Saying more would be a spoiler.

The intense conversations between the two protagonists (Nietzsche and Breuer), centre around the human mind - the cusp where philosophy meets psychotherapy. The story provides the stage to explore whether individual psychotherapy can be generalised into a medical science, and can philosophy be turned into an applied discipline, as a cure for mental distress in a given individual case. Despair, loneliness, obsession, death, betrayal, dreams, which lie at the fringes of existential spectrum, are recurrent themes in the book, as are more mundane matters like lust, duplicity and marriage.  

As they get more personal and come on first name terms the doctor-patient relationship between Friedrich and Josef blurs. Who is treating who? The treatment becomes simultaneously a contest and a collaboration. Will they meet their objectives? Can they meet their objectives?  

As a reviewer, my task is to give you an honest and good enough picture of the book so that you are either intrigued enough to read it or decide that it's not for you. Towards this end, I could have echoed the pithy descriptor - 'teaching novel' - as the author himself called it.

But as a novel, I can find several faults with it. Other than the two protagonists no other character is sufficiently developed. The female characters seem very one dimensional. The denouement seemed a bit unrealistic. 

As a teaching aid too it offers only a small window in Nietzschean thought and can't even be called a primer. Psychoanalysis was just getting seeded at that time, and  beyond a point, there isn't scope to logically expound on it. 

But yet I highly recommend it. 

In a Whiskey Sour (a cocktail with Bourbon whiskey, lime, syrup, egg white, and bitters), each ingredient individually isn't appealing when described in the recipe, but when blended in the right proportions by a good bartender it can be delightful. But even for cocktail lovers it is an acquired taste. 

Think of this book as the Whiskey Sour of the Mind. 

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My rating:  4 stars