Although The Name of the Rose is Umberto Eco’s first novel, his name is far from unfamiliar. Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of several important works in the fields of cultural history, aesthetics, and the theory of signs. He has taught in American universities as well, and two of his books (A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader) have been published here. Although Eco’s Opera aperta (1962) is considered one of the theoretical bases for the work of the aggressively experimental Italian writers who gained notoriety in the early Sixties under the rubric “Gruppo ’63,” he himself has produced an entirely different kind of fiction: a “good read” (there is such a genre). The Name of the Rose is Italy’s most popular novel since Lampedusa’s Leopard, the success of which was such an irritant to Eco and the avant-gardists of 1963. Not surprisingly, Eco’s novel has been received in some circles as a kind of betrayal. One of his colleagues lamented recently that “Barthes and Jakobson are dead, Kristeva has turned into a psychoanalyst and Eco into a novelist,” as though all these desertions from the field of semiotic inquiry were equally definitive.

Eco claims not to have consciously aimed at conquering a popular audience: “If it’s true that the public was looking for theological discussions, Benedictine monks, just ten pages of love out of five hundred, and lots of Latin, then it’s