The Horse and the Baskerville (The Name of the Rose "First Day" part 1)

TMBC Week 1

John’s Comments:

What can I say? We have failed you all. Neither of us managed to get to the end of the “First Day.” Our goal is still to finish Second Day by this time next week, though—we both just have some catching up to do, and we promise to get there. As of now, I managed to get to page 73; I’m not even sure Melissa read the thing. One thing I know for sure is that Eco definitely wasn’t playing when he said only the worthy can get to the good part. I’m kind of missing Baron Harkonnen’s flamboyant lust for his darling nephew so far…

I’m not saying the book is bad. The medieval history is impressive. The guy that wrote it is a genius, which is why it’s been hard for a mere mortal such as myself to get behind it. I can safely say that my writing is complete shit and any book I’ve written sucks just from reading these first few pages, my vocabulary prowess is far too subpar.

My favorite portions of the book have actually been some of the toughest to get through. Adso’s vision and the conversation between William and Ubertino were fascinating—even with the difficulty understanding exactly what was being said. I still don’t know what to make of the vision, especially since Adso said it was the key to the murder, maybe I’m just dumb. The murder mystery is interesting. I’m excited to get into the meat and potatoes of it. Was the murderer a shamed lover of the man he killed? We’ll find out soon.

Eco was a skeptic. Yet this book is riddled with theology and musings about heavens and hells and everything in between which takes one with a higher understanding of the something out there to write about. Does being a skeptic mean you believe that when you die the lights go out, or can you still believe something grand is in store for you? I guess my upbringing would believe the former, but for some reason I’m drawn to wonder what Eco’s beliefs were as he wrote this. That seems to be my fascination with the minds of most people I read. So I’ll leave with this: I believe there’s a whole new world out there to be found once you die. What do you think lies awaiting us?

Melissa’s Comments:

To all the people who we convinced to start reading this thing with us, I’m sorry. I tried. I really did. But I’m a slow reader and I started too late, and this isn’t really the kind of book you can ‘power read’ fifty pages of in one sitting, so here I am.

Plus, the first ten or so pages took up half my reading time—when Eco was going on about the manuscript he stumbled upon, it took me forever to figure out that Adso was a fictional character, and the history dump in the Prologue was pretty dense.

The book picked up in the first chapter, though (or “First Day”), and for a book that comes with a disclaimer that it is difficult to get through, it was surprisingly juicy. I was floored by just how easily Eco wove ordinary detective story tropes (i.e. William of Baskerville being a deductive genius, as evidenced by the conversations about the horse) into a book that I expect to break just about all of them. There’s suspense and intrigue (I don’t trust the Abbot for a hot second). The detective in our story is likable and interesting.

I stopped reading a few pages into the “Sext” (not that kind) portion of the First Day. The book is good so far, and I want to do it justice—it’s the kind of book that deserves alert, quiet reading. Also, the vision scene kind of threw me for a loop. I’m curious—what do you guys make of it?

The scene that stuck out to me the most was the one in which they talked about the origins of evil. It was interesting that the characters attributed to an external ‘Devil.’ Of course, they’re religious men, so this is exactly what they would say, but it made me wonder if Eco himself believed it. As John pointed out, he was a skeptic, but the ‘mystical’ parts of this novel seem genuine.

In short, I’m excited to keep reading. Stick with us—we’ll have the Second Day done by next week. If something super juicy happened at the end of day one that you’re dying to hear us comment on, you have our sincerest apologies.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any comments (or if there’s some stuff in these pages that’s worth mentioning that went right over our heads, please comment—we’ve long since resigned to the fact that our readers are way more intelligent than we are.

See you next week!