Getting Slap-Happy (The Name of the Rose "Fourth Day")

TMBC Week 4

John’s Comments:

Poor Adso. Just as he finally gets his D wet, the grossest monk in the abbey becomes Mr. Steal-Your-Girl. On top of that, she’s deemed a witch by the new biggest baddest inquisitor on the market, Bernard Gui.

That’s right. This chapter flipped the script. Gone were the mentioning of Berengar and Adelmo getting hot and heavy (save for one line at the end of day). Adso lost in purity and mated lwith a poor girl from the village who he had walked in on in the kitchen after a night’s romp in the library. As happy as I was for Adso to have finally become a man, the whole situation didn’t make much sense. The girl was about to get slap happy with the cellarer in exchange for a beautiful cow heart to scarf down later, but when Adso walks in on them in the dark of the kitchen the guy scrams and Adso and the girl are so overcome with lust for each other that they pork right then and there. He must have done quite the job since she didn’t even have sense enough to pick up that cow heart before it was time to go back down to the village.

After that we learn Adso is a huge simp. We then meet the band of inquisitors/the Pope’s henchmen who arrive to the abbey. More extremely tedious inquisition history lessons take place, William and Adso uncover the secret of how the library’s labyrinth is categorized, and we get nowhere closer to finding out who the murderer is than when the chapter started. And no one died! Well, maybe by the start of the next day Adso’s girl will already have been burned at the stake…

In the last post I mentioned that Jorge and Benno were my two picks for who could potentially be the murderer. I give you another candidate: Alinardo. He’s the monk that’s been explaining how all three deaths so far have been done in a fashion to appear like the seven signs of the Apocalypse from the book of Revelation. He’s been right so far, and also been appearing to be downright crazy. Could he be a dark horse candidate hiding in plain sight? Maybe. Am I ready to switch my guess to him? Not exactly, but it does seem likely that the guy could know something is up—unless that means he’ll be the next person to go.

We’re nearing the end. I haven’t had much fun with this lately. We should be done in the next two weeks. Who do you think did it?

Melissa’s Comments:

Alright, well John basically said it all with this one. I gotta admit, he held up his end of the bargain way better than I have this week. I only read about half of Fourth Day so far (I’ll try to catch up, I promise), and even if I had finished it, I probably wouldn’t have had much to say. My eyes are glazing over. My brain is turned to mush. I absolutely loathe this book.

He was also ready to post this thing (on time) yesterday—I was the one who delayed the posting of it. I deluded myself into thinking I was going to read fifty pages today and write something profound. I was wrong.

I’m truly sorry. We picked two stinkers in a row. If possible, this one’s more painful than Dune, because I feel like I need to really pay attention to it.

Anyway, thanks for reading. See you next week, where we’ll be discussing Week 5 (assuming I don’t gouge my eyes out along the way).

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