About Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco was born January 5, 1932, in Alessandrai, Italy. He was a novelist, literary critic, and university professor. His best-known work was a 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose, an historical mystery set in an Italian monastery during 1327. The novel was made into a movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater in 1986. He wrote other novels as well as academic texts, essays, and children’s books. Eco received the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in 2005.
Umberto’s father was an accountant, who later served in three wars. Their family name, ECO, is actually an acronym of the Latin phrase, ex caelis oblatus, which means, “a gift from the heavens.” The name was bestowed upon his grandfather by a city official.
After finishing high school in Alessandria, Umberto’s father wanted him to become a lawyer. Instead, he earned a degree in Philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954. He also studied medieval philosophy and literature. He left the Catholic Church and stopped believing in God while he was at the university and began a lecturing career at his alma mater.
In 1962, he married a German art teacher, and they had one son and a daughter. Eco is known for his vast library, which included 30,000 volumes in one of his homes and 20,000 volumes at another. In 1992-93, Eco was a professor at Harvard University. He received his doctorate in 1993 from Indiana University Bloomington and was bestowed several other honorary doctorates.
Eco’s fiction enjoyed a worldwide audience, with his books being translated into many languages. He died in 2016, from pancreatic cancer.
About The Name of the Rose (from its description at Amazon):
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”
To those who criticized Eco’s first hundred pages of his debut novel, he said, “My friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the mountain.”
How did Umberto Eco get the idea to write The Name of the Rose?
A publisher invited Eco to write a short detective novel in the late 1970s. His response was no. “But if I ever did write one, it would be a 500-page book with medieval monks as characters.” He then proceeded to make a list of characters – fictional monks. He once said a mental image of a poisoned monk “emerged in my mind. It all started from there, from that one image.” From that point, the story became an “irresistible urge.”
Although that poisoned image was the initial spark, the Abbey of Sacra di San Michele, where the book is set, is known as “The mountaintop inspiration for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.” The church towers above a valley from its rocky crag. A staircase of 243 steps known as the Scalone dei Morti (“Stairway of the Dead”) leads to a masterwork sculpture. The staircase is flanked by arches, niches, and tombs. At one time, skeletons of dead monks were visible to those ascending the steps.
Excerpt from The Name of the Rose (opening paragraph of the Prologue):
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.
Quotes by Umberto Eco:
- I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
- The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
- Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear.