The Name Of The Rose And Its Six Page Door

William of Baskerville shows up at an Italian abbey in 1327 to investigate a possible heresy and ends up investigating a string of murders instead, and if that setup sounds like Sherlock Holmes in a monk’s robe, that’s not an accident, one reviewer flat out said he sounded like Sean Connery in their head the entire time, which, having since watched the movie, tracks perfectly.

I’ll be honest about the slog, there is a description of a carved door that genuinely runs several pages, and long theological debates about church poverty that stopped me cold more than once. I kept a note open on my phone translating the Latin passages because I don’t have a key to the book the way some readers apparently do, and without one whole exchanges just sit there in a language you’re meant to absorb by texture rather than meaning. One reviewer rated it three stars for the first two thirds and five for the final third, and that’s about the shape of my own experience too, patience tax up front, payoff at the end.

Where it earns those five stars for me is the library itself, a labyrinth built specifically to be unsolvable, hiding a book that’s apparently dangerous enough to kill for, and once Adso and William actually start working the mystery instead of debating theology, the pace snaps into something genuinely gripping. The final stretch, the fire, the reveal of what’s actually in that book, is as good as murder mystery plotting gets.

Four stars, not five, purely because of how much of the middle third tests your patience with material that’s clearly closer to Eco showing off his medieval scholarship than serving the plot. Worth it anyway.