Extract

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

Seven deaths in seven days inside a Benedictine abbey in 1327, and a Franciscan friar with the mind of Sherlock Holmes moves through scriptorium and labyrinth, pursuing a mystery bound up in a forbidden book. Umberto Eco's 1980 novel is at once a medieval detective story, a philosophical treatise on signs and interpretation, and a love letter to the written word and the libraries that house it. The prose is dense with theology, optics, heresy, and the politics of laughter. Eco, a semiotician by profession, built a narrative that enacts its own theory: meaning is a maze, and every text conceals another text beneath it. The abbey burns, as all great libraries eventually burn, but the memory of what was read there survives.