Milo Manara says that he has the habit of beautifying reality. That all vices were like that. The first of the two volumes that will make up The name of the rose (Lumen, 2023), the graphic adaptation of the novel that Umberto Eco’s children commissioned from the Italian cartoonist, is a perfect example of this principle. Far from the Gothic atmosphere that reigned in the film adaptation—which, more than pure Gothic, was the dark idea that the 19th century romantics of this period had—Manara shows us a Middle Ages full of light and humor, of the fantasy of marginalia. and of imagination and faith. Because, like Eco’s, his Middle Ages are not made of darkness, and perhaps it is this luminosity that sneaks into many of the vignettes that makes the darkness of the story stand out so much better.
I don’t think there is anyone who can talk about The name of the rose without remembering the movie, with that Sean Connery embellishing the role of William of Baskerville, the Franciscan who investigates a series of murders in a Benedictine abbey in the Italian Alps. It wasn’t easy for Manara to make us forget the Scotsman, but he had the brilliant idea of choosing Marlon Brando as a model for his protagonist, who has a physique just as powerful and attractive (or more so) and is so perfect that, once You see him appear in the first drawing, you don’t remember Connery again throughout the entire reading. Getting rid of the film’s imagery has been one of his biggest challenges; I would say that he has solved it in a very intelligent way.
The first 100 pages of The name of the rose They happen, according to Eco, at the rhythm of an abbey. In fact, when his friends and editors read the manuscript, they suggested that he abridge it because they found it too demanding, too difficult. He refused: if someone wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, they had to do so outside the monastery. Those first 100 pages were a kind of penance that the reader had to go through; If someone didn’t like it, so much the worse for him. I love—and it makes me envy—this confidence of the Italian writer in what was, after all, his first novel. And it’s fantastic to see how the public agreed with him.
In the graphic adaptation, however, we are spared this suffering—or enjoyment, depending—and we immediately enter the world of the monks with great ease. It is a delicious, beautiful, elegant comic. It reads very well, the story fits phenomenally in Manara’s hands and I think that aesthetically there is no buts to it. There are scenes of extraordinary beauty and, if I were given to choose one vignette among them all, I would have a hard time deciding. Maybe I would opt for that one scriptorium flooded with light or by the arrival of William and Adso at the monastery, walking on the snow under the bare trees. But I haven’t finished writing this and the kitchen and its enormous chimney, the vision of Adso at the doors of the church or that abbey hanging on the black rock wall are already running through my memory… To the undoubted artistic value we must add, Also, the magnificent ability of the artist to distill the content of 350 pages into 72 without losing anything fundamental along the way. His work is impeccable.
As far as the editing is concerned, I did miss some details. It would have been very good, for example, to dedicate more than a page to explaining the historical context, which remains as if it were stuck on pins and needles: 1327 is very far away for most readers. A map of the abbey and a cheat sheet with the canonical hours (as in the novel) would not have been amiss either to comfortably follow the development of the story. Surely they would have contributed more than the pretty pencil sketches on the final pages. Despite these little things, the comic stands up very well on its own and does not need the support of the book from which it draws or the film from which it flees. Blessed is Manara’s vice if he gives us books like this.
The name of the rose
Author:
Umberto Eco (illustrations by Milo Manara)
Year of publication:
2023
2023-10-26 03:29:41
#Medieval #luminosity #Alpha #Omega
