In Dan Brown times, this is an excellent book of quality mistery, having as background the Church and all of its discussions, in this case, if Christ would of smiled or not. What does it mean, besides being great? It's a book with a mazy narrative (any similarity with the internet is not a mere coincidence!), namely, with several layers. In a first moment we have the adventures of Guilherme of Baskerville (Sherlock Holmes on a cassock...) and his disciple Adso (Elemental, my dear Watson...) in the investigation of seven crimes in seven days; there is the debate about richess and poorness; between the rationalism and the mysticism; philosophical issues (like - where's the Truth?); a lot of irony and a fiction story supported in various historical aspects ( the so-called historical metafiction), in a plot of a true action
novel, that captures the reader's attention until the end. It is very intriguing that book's success all over the world, after all, although it is excellent, it is known that that book does not belong to best-sellers'formula, because it is
long, it has several passages in latin (and which is a cultural lapse to whom
doesn't manage the language, but it doesn't compromise the story, anyway...), there are several descriptions (hilarious, the Gulherme's glasses description!!), shorten, it
really looks like a book of memories of a curious monk with a medievalist mind... Probably what pleases so much so many
readers is the action novel structure, allied to the direction of the movie based on the work... (moreover, a curiosity: almost half of the
italian population that knows the story thinks that the
books'author is, no more no less than... - Sir Sean Connery, the actor that embodies religious "Sherlock Holmes"!)... At long last, what really matters is that this is one of the italian books better sold in the world and shows that not everything is lost, that there are still readers interested in good quality reading!!!
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