In English.) He is also a historian, a scholarly critic of the works of James Joyce and a distinguished teacher at the University of Bologna.įOR many years he has also been an extremely popular columnist for the magazine L'Espresso. Eco's ''Role of the Reader,'' recently published (The reader who is curious about it might look into Mr. That elegant pursuit of the meaning of signs in language and elsewhere, since the death of Roland Barthes. In international forums he is considered the most important representative of semiotics, Leader of contemporary Italian culture, a man whose academic and ideological prestige has grown steadily through years of dazzling and solid work. Eco's accomplishment seems to have the sturdy pace of inevitability, so that one is tempted to explore the reasons for the celebrity of this novel even before commenting on it. Translating a book with so many voices and levels of meaning cannot have been easy. Now this excellent translation by William Weaver makes ''The Name of the Rose'' available in English. Of the most important literary awards in France and in Italy (the Prix Medici and the Premio Strega).

On the best-seller list practically everywhere, the book has also received two The manuscript of the lost second part of the ''Poetics'' by Aristotle - the lost book containing his theory of comedy and laughter - has been found in the library and that somebody will do anything to stop theĪt this point all you have to know is that Umberto Eco has written a novel - his first - and that it has become a literary event in Europe. Imagine also that toward the end of the narrative it turns out that all those horrible crimes were committed for highly ethical and cultural reasons. A learned Franciscan who is sent to solve the mysteryįinds himself involved in the frightening events inside the abbey. One after the other, half a dozen monks are found murdered in the most bizarre ways. IMAGINE a medieval castle run by the Benedictines, with cellarers, herbalists, gardeners, librarians, young novices.

New York: A Helen & Kurt Wolff Book/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Lead: THE NAME OF THE ROSE, By Umberto Eco. His latest book is ''The Poetics of Disguise: Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. Section 7, Column 4 Book Review Deskīy Franco Ferrucci Franco Ferrucci is an Italian novelist and essayist who teaches at Rutgers University. June 5, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

I the name of the rose