December 8, 2024

Real Housewives of The Benedictine Order

"I saw Brother Ubertino in the Aedificium" Girl what were YOU doing in the Aedificium 👀

This post was written as part of The Conclave’s promotional release tour. Just kidding but wouldn’t that slay so hard does anybody know anyone at The Conclave I could talk to

I read The Name of the Rose because Defector said it was like if The Da Vinci Code was good and my feelings on it are… complicated. Did I have a great time? Absolutely, but it should be clear at this point that I’m insane and my capacity to exert effort in service of The Bit surely hits some diagnostic threshold. Could I, in good faith, casually recommend a friend read it? NO! It’s like 500 pages and for everything cool that happens you have to read 30 pages about an ideological fight between Benedictines and Franciscans and the only woman in the whole book appears, instantly shows her tits, and then is presumably burned at the stake off-camera (protagonist isn’t bothered to find out) without ever speaking. Even this is making you a little bit curious about the book though, huh?

It’s about a reformed member of the inquisition who’s been called to an unnamed abbey in 1327 Italy to investigate a monk’s death, narrated by his hapless novice assistant. As the two chase leads around the abbey and try to gain access to the Aedificium, a library teeming with rare editions housed inside a terrifying labyrinth and banned to non-librarians, monks continue to drop like flies around them but that doesn’t stop everyone from regularly breaking out in violence over whether Jesus believed in private property and to what extent the new pope sucks shit.

Every one of these guys is crazy in their own discrete way. Our narrator gets so tripped out looking at a cool carved door that he has a vision that he describes for at least five pages and then later when he sees an ugly guy he goes “hah that guy looks like one of the ugly dogs in that vision I just had” which is a level of burn I had not yet conceived.

One of these guys holds our narrator captive for 10 minutes talking about all these sexy heretic cult activities he heard about that sounds almost exactly like Ralph Wiggum saying that thing about seeing Ms Krabappel and Principal Skinner in the closet making babies and one of the babies looked at me. And then the inquisitor goes “that is a made up story from a two-hundred-year-old scroll you read, none of that is real” and then the other guy goes “well that’s your opinion.” Shockingly modern!

An extremely old and blind monk is upset about some of a murdered monk’s text illuminations being too fun and goes on a rant about them like “a horse where the front part is a horse but the back part is a ram??? a dog sleeping in a people bed??? this is truly evil work that signifies the end of times” and our narrator is like “damn, he really must hate these illustrations considering he’s blind and probably hasn’t seen them for years and dedicated their most intricate details to memory, in order to hate them so effectively” and then a bunch of the other monks tell the old old man “we just talked about this yesterday and decided the fun drawings are fine based on Aristotle’s theses” and the old man goes “I’m sure I don’t remember anything about that due to being so so old” and shuffles away. And then one of the other monks goes “I never liked that dead monk much anyway because he had really slutty eyes.” I can’t express enough how much every single character we encounter for the first 100 pages is Like This.

I usually wouldn’t talk about a book ending and please don’t read this if you are averse to spoilers but the climax of this book is actually so insane that I have to talk about this in case you never pick this one up: After making it into the bowels of the labyrinth in search of the murderer, who has been killing to keep secret a book that proves humor isn’t ontologically evil (this is almost verbatim I swear to god), the detective and his assistant are forced to chase him through pitch darkness, past howling tunnels and weird herbal mists, as he tries his hardest to tear each page out of the offending book and eat it before he gets caught. Seriously sit there for a second and imagine a killer who’s just been unmasked knocking over bookshelves and stuff as he flees capture and also he is trying to eat an entire old book as fast as he can. I’m in awe of the image honestly.

I wouldn’t recommend reading this book if you are even sort of an impatient person (I am, but I found respite by landing, like a bird, on certain insane passages to see me through parts where, for instance, the protagonist talks about truffle hunting for five pages) but I will say that the long-winded style does make it feel more like an actual 14th century monk is communicating gossip to you. If you like that kind of thing.

Nicked feels a lot like an 11th century monk telling you about gossip but is waaaaaaay easier to get through. It follows Nicephorus, an embarrassingly earnest and naive monk who has a pretty forgettable dream that his bosses insist is a sign from The Lord that they should Liberate The Bones of St Nicholas from Turkey. That’s right, this is a book about a Middle Age Bones Heist.

Nicephorus is paired up with professional relic thief who looks like a sexy pirate (not that Nicephorus could ever possibly notice such a thing) who spends the course of the book astounded at the monk’s inability to tell a lie or even really process sarcasm or figures of speech.

The prose is written in a style that really does feel medieval (including some elements of contemporaneous lore, like the thief’s assistant being a cynocephalus, a race of dog-headed people that most folks thought existed somewhere in the world throughout the middle ages. It’s a lovely, odd gem of a book.

I’ll be so honest with you, Matrix is not as much of a good time as Rose or Nicked because Lauren Groff Does Not Do Good Times. Lauren Groff does Painstakingly Chronicled, Beautifully Rendered Suffering. So jot that down.

Matrix follows 17-year-old Marie de France after she’s kicked out of royal court (amid tensions with the queen that are Definitely Straight in Nature) and chooses life at an abbey over struggling to find a marriage match. In sweeping movements the book follows Marie’s entire life at the abbey as she makes friends and enemies and ascends the ranks, ultimately deciding to build a maze around the abbey to protect it from the outside world (read: men).

Marie is descended from a long line of female warriors and outcasts and this informs her leadership of the abbey, her ability to maintain control in the surrounding countryside, her massive web of informants keeping her knowledge current, and her management of all the simmering conflicts that arise between the women who have been cloistered together. Another intricately crafted period piece where you can practically feel the chill coming off the ancient stone walls.