Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The important thing to remember about reading The Name of the Rose is that Eco front-loads a lot of his crazy description as a test to his reader. If you read in a little ways you'll get to an epic-length description of the monastery doorway. In his postscript Eco talks about how he made that doorway description deliberately intimidating to scare away readers who weren't going to be able to handle the rest of the book. It's a test -- if you get through it, whether by skipping ahead or reading straight through, you can probably handle the rest of the novel, even if you just do it by skipping over all the hard parts and reading for story.