Where to Start with Umberto Eco: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Umberto Eco — whether to begin with The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, or his essays. A complete reading guide to Eco's novels.
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was a semiotician, medievalist, cultural critic, and novelist — one of the most intellectually wide-ranging figures of the late twentieth century. His fiction — particularly The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum — is the most sustained demonstration in popular fiction of the idea that a novel can be simultaneously a gripping genre story and a work of serious philosophical and cultural argument. His novels are embedded in layers of historical, philosophical, and literary allusion that make them available at multiple levels of depth.
Where to Start
The Essential Novel: The Name of the Rose (1980)
The essential first Eco — and one of the most intellectually ambitious bestsellers ever written. William of Baskerville’s investigation of deaths in a medieval monastery is organised as a murder mystery whose solution turns on questions about the nature of truth, the politics of knowledge, and the relationship between laughter and religious authority. The novel can be read entirely as a thriller — the mystery is genuinely mysterious and the resolution is genuinely surprising — but it also operates as a meditation on how institutions control information and what happens to those who seek knowledge that those institutions want suppressed. The Franciscan theological debates in the middle sections can be read quickly; they become important in retrospect.
The Conspiracy Novel: Foucault’s Pendulum (1988)
Eco’s most demanding novel — and, for readers who can engage with it, his most rewarding. Casaubon and his colleagues’ invention of a meta-conspiracy (a ‘Plan’ that would explain all other conspiracies as fragments of a larger secret) is Eco’s most sustained investigation of the paranoid mind-set: the belief that nothing is accidental, that everything is connected, and that the truth is always hidden beneath the surface. The novel is simultaneously a brilliant satire of conspiracy thinking and a thriller in which the invented conspiracy acquires a terrifying reality. Requires some familiarity with the history of esoteric movements and Kabbalistic thought; more rewarding for readers who bring that knowledge.
Reading Umberto Eco
Eco’s novels are organised as invitations to multiple levels of reading — a technique he described as ‘intentio operis’ (the intent of the work), which is independent of the author’s intent and the reader’s interpretation. Each novel can be read as genre fiction (thriller, historical novel, satire); each can also be read as a philosophical investigation of the genre it appears to be; and each contains, beneath both of these levels, a serious argument about semiotics, interpretation, and the nature of meaning. The best approach is to trust the genre surface on a first reading and allow the deeper structure to emerge; a second reading, with more awareness of Eco’s intellectual concerns, reveals what the first reading contained.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Umberto Eco?
The Name of the Rose (1980) is the essential starting point — Eco's debut novel, in which the English Franciscan friar William of Baskerville investigates a series of murders at a medieval Italian monastery and discovers a conspiracy involving the preservation of forbidden knowledge. It is a murder mystery, a historical novel, a philosophical novel about truth and interpretation, and a meditation on the relationship between knowledge, power, and censorship. It can be read as a straightforward thriller by readers who are not interested in its semiotics; it rewards more philosophically engaged readers with an additional layer of argument.
What is The Name of the Rose about?
The Name of the Rose (1980) is set in a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy in 1327. William of Baskerville — a Franciscan monk and former Inquisitor, clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes — arrives at the monastery with his novice Adso (the narrator) to attend a theological conference, and finds himself investigating the deaths of several monks. The deaths are connected to a forbidden book in the monastery's labyrinthine library; the nature of that book — what it is, why its possession is worth killing over — is the novel's central mystery. Eco uses the thriller framework to develop a rich account of medieval theological controversy and the politics of knowledge.
Is The Name of the Rose difficult to read?
The Name of the Rose begins with an extended medieval theological prologue that intimidates many first readers — Eco advised in interviews that readers who find the first hundred pages slow should skip ahead to Chapter Two. The novel's references to medieval philosophy, Franciscan poverty debates, and semiotics can be followed at multiple levels of depth: readers with no knowledge of these subjects can follow the thriller plot; readers with some knowledge will find additional pleasures in the philosophical argument. The most demanding sections are the theological debates; the murder mystery and the characters of William and Adso carry readers through them.
What is Foucault's Pendulum about?
Foucault's Pendulum (1988) follows three editors at a Milanese publishing house who, having grown bored processing conspiracy theories about the Templars and the Rosicrucians, invent their own vast conspiracy to connect all existing conspiracies — a 'Plan' that spans seven hundred years of history. The conspiracy then begins to seem real. The novel is Eco's most complex and most demanding work, requiring some knowledge of the history of esoteric movements (Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry) to follow its argument; it is also his most brilliant satire of the paranoid mind-set that finds hidden meaning in everything.
