5, 1932, in Alessandria, a town east of Turin. In 2000, when awarding Eco Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for communications, the jury praised his works ``of universal distribution and profound effect that are already classics in contemporary thought.''Įco was born Jan. His second novel, the 1988 ``Foucault's Pendulum,'' a byzantine tale of plotting publishers and secret sects also styled as a thriller, was successful, too _ and so complicated that an annotated guide accompanied it to help the reader follow the plot. The last line of the book says, in Latin: ``Yesterday's rose endures in its name we hold empty names.'' That meant, Eco said that ideas are the only imperishable things.Įco retouched the thriller in 2012, telling Corriere della Sera that he wanted to change ``certain expressions and repetitions that annoyed me,'' while also lightening up some of the Latin citations to help readers, ``even if I could have forgotten the readers, seeing as the book has sold 30 million copies.''Įco told the newspaper that the official publishing numbers may have been off by a large margin, explaining that when ``The Name of the Rose'' was published there were no deals with publishing houses in Eastern Europe and Asia, which published their own translations without obtaining rights or paying royalties. ``When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.'' ``Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry,'' he wrote.

The book sparkled with references to his intellectual preoccupations. ``The Name of the Rose'' sold millions of copies, a feat for a narrative filled with partially translated Latin quotes and puzzling musings on the nature of symbols.Įco said his work on the novel was ``prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk.'' ``The Name of the Rose'' made an international celebrity, especially after the medieval thriller set in a monastery was made into a film starring Sean Connery in 1986. The bearded, heavy-set scholar, critic and novelist took on the esoteric theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in language popular culture icons like James Bond and the technical languages of the Internet. Author of books ranging from novels to scholarly tomes to essay collections, Eco was fascinated with the obscure and the mundane, and his books were both engaging narratives and philosophical and intellectual exercises.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco