Foucault’s Pendulum in Foucault's Pendulum

Dec 27, 2011 Traveller rated it really liked it

Shelves: four-and-a-half-stars, favorites, translated, 1001-books

Descartes said: Cogito, ergo sum.
Eco says: I seek meaning, therefore I am human.

It's very hard to succinctly describe exactly what this novel is. From looking at the plot description, you may be forgiven for assuming that it is a book like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, or Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. There is an overlap in the fact that all three books deal with conspiracies that revolve around the mystical and mythical order of the Knight's Templ ...more

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Nov 25, 2013 Dolors rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2013

“ “Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don’t come out honorably, we’ll all look silly.”
“Silly to whom?”
“Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth.”
“Quid est veritas?” Belbo asked.
“Us,” I said.” ” (p.435)

Truth? What is truth? Truth is relative. Or isn’t it?
The fact that Umberto Eco portrays one of his characters quoting Pontius Pilate’s assertion that truth is hard to ascertain with some sort of consistent resonance of a Nietzschian Superman who has passed “beyond good and evil” ...more

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Dec 02, 2013 Paul rated it really liked it

Eco likes to show off his knowledge and the depth of his reading and he does so with a great flourish in this novel. It’s a difficult one to classify as it crosses genres and throws all sorts of references into the pot. It is really part thriller, part detective with a good dose of conspiracy theory and meandering down the byways of historical obscurity. Of course the whole thing may just be a postmodern joke!
There are lots of nods, winks and jokes throughout. Eco was good friends with the Frenc Eco likes to show off his knowledge and the depth of his reading and he does so with a great flourish in this novel. It’s a difficult one to classify as it crosses genres and throws all sorts of references into the pot. It is really part thriller, part detective with a good dose of conspiracy theory and meandering down the byways of historical obscurity. Of course the whole thing may just be a postmodern joke!
There are lots of nods, winks and jokes throughout. Eco was good friends with the French philosopher Foucault and the literary and historical references are numerous. Ten years before Dan Brown, Eco throws in the Templars, the Masons, the Kabbalah, Gnosticism, the Elders of Zion, the Jesuits, the Cathars and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment to name but a few. Obviously the grail is at the centre of it all; as is a device called Foucault’s pendulum. The plot revolves around three friends who work for a rather esoteric and dubious publishing company. There is a great deal of fun with coded and secret manuscripts and secret organisations and the friends after much research and following clues construct their own grand conspiracy theory called The Plan (completely made up). Throughout their researches and travels they have come across various members of secret societies, (most of them based on the Templars) and once they are told about the plan the trouble really starts. A grand over-arching plan is what most conspiracy theorists dream about and they fall for it and having been told there is a secret map and word are determined to get it. This puts the friends in danger.
The whole thing is narrated in flashback by Casuabon. Another element is the thought that Casuabon may not be an entirely reliable narrator. Casuabon, as his name indicates (Middlemarch and there was an actual scholar called Casuabon) represents knowledge. Another friend, Belbo, seems to seems to represent the search for inner fulfilment (possibly) and Diotallevi seems to represent a more religious certainty.
There are so many references and lines of inquiry to follow that the reader has to decide whether to take the time to do so. I decided to drift through the whole thing with a limited follow up as the book could have taken all year! It’s great fun and much better than Dan Brown. I thought the ending was a bit of a letdown, but I must admit I wouldn’t have known how to end it!
...more

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May 18, 2010 Jonfaith rated it it was amazing

Shelves: always-rereading

I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

Perhaps I have lived my life as if it was within the pages of this novel? If I do ascribe to a metanarraive, despite my Nietzschean education, it is this powerful novel: a handbook for the cynically perplexed. I wasn't sure of anything and reading this confirmed it. I've grown to love how the scenes parallel one another, how th ...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Basim Mahmoud rated it it was amazing

Shelves: الساحر-أومبرتو-إيكو, masterpiece

Dear Umberto Eco,

If the devil has Ph.D , no doubt that he studied at the university that you have established and also that you put the material of the studies in it .

Your technique nearly was printed in my soul so that once while I was standing in the pharmacy thinking between your way of writing and its effect on me will make me write a novel full of drugs and it will be noted on its cover " Should be read with 20 mg of opium and don't forget the accompanied present with the book : laxative ta ...more

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Jul 07, 2015 Raúl Omar rated it really liked it

Shelves: have-to-read-it-again, historical-fiction, kindle

Eco never disappoints me. I was still reading The Name of the Rose when I bougth Foucault's Pendulum without a second thought. Yet, I didn't read it right away because The Name of the Rose seemed to me so amazing, that I feared that after it, anything might be a disappointment. So I waited about half to gladly discover that I was wrong: Foucault's Pendulum is amazing. In fact, one of the nicest readings of 2016.

This is quite an interesting book, I completely enjoyed it. Not a comical reading of Eco never disappoints me. I was still reading The Name of the Rose when I bougth Foucault's Pendulum without a second thought. Yet, I didn't read it right away because The Name of the Rose seemed to me so amazing, that I feared that after it, anything might be a disappointment. So I waited about half to gladly discover that I was wrong: Foucault's Pendulum is amazing. In fact, one of the nicest readings of 2016.

This is quite an interesting book, I completely enjoyed it. Not a comical reading of course but Eco has a very good sense of humour. The style is everything you might expect from Eco: elegant, neat and learned. The plot is great and, I believe, what make this book so unique. Eco puts everything in its proper place at the proper time, I couldn't stop reading, the story totally absorbed me.

This is about 'three friends who invent a conspiracy which becomes real', yes, but this novel is lot more than that. The process is very funny, and the consequences are tremendous. It's amazing how Eco manages to connect all the dots and achieves to give a coherent meaning to randomly assorted data. This book really made me consider my own perspective of the world and life events. With this satire Eco makes clear how we tend to associate events and facts and how we feel more comfortable when we confer meaning to things and can relate random events to plausible explanations. Not only Eco shows this tendency to find meaning but also how easy it is to believe something that makes sense. I experienced as a reader, knowing that it was all fiction, certain doubt about the conspiracy.

Why 4 stars instead of 5 if this is such an amazing book? Because this book was quite hard to read. A Storm of Swords was a 'relaxed' reading afterwards. By hard I don't mean boring, I mean difficult, not precisely a light reading.. There are a lot of details, many important events and the timeline is kind of messy. Besides, there are a lot of facts, references, historic events, authors and books mentioned, I easily lost track of what was going on, had to read holding the book in one hand and google on the other. I've read reviews criticizing Eco for been presumptuous and using this book to brag how much does he know. Well, I differ: Eco is Bragging, his characters are. I mean, I really liked the characters but the main three are perfect examples of smtartass. My point is that I don't think Eco wants to show off his knowledge, he is only providing the proper set of conditions and context in which this novel takes place. ...more

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Jan 27, 2014 Derek rated it liked it · review of another edition

I loved this 450 page book. Unfortunately, it was almost 700…

Up until the point where our central characters actually started to develop "The Plan"—a hoax connecting every occult legend they can find—I was enjoying it, but then Eco got bogged down in the intricate details of The Plan, and I drifted.

I loved Belbo's use of his computer—Abulafia, an early PC (repeatedly called a "Word Processor", but I never saw a word processor that was anything more than a paperless typewriter)—to not only store

...more

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Jan 22, 2010 Traveller marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Descartes said: Cogito, ergo sum.
Eco says: I seek meaning, therefore I am human.

It's very hard to succinctly describe exactly what this novel is. From looking at the plot description, you may be forgiven for assuming that it is a book like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, or Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. There is an overlap in the fact that all three books deal with conspiracies that revolve around the mystical and mythical order of the Knight's Templ ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Dec 05, 2013 Saski rated it liked it

Shelves: 1001

I came to Foucault's Pendulum the way I imagine most of us do, through The Name of the Rose. That book I enjoyed so much I read twice in the same year, the second time aloud to the driver on long car trips, not easy when one remembers the plethora of languages one must pronounce, easy for me then as I was in the middle of a linguistics master's. I guess it would not be odd to expect something similar from this book, well researched in the extreme displayed in fascinating detail as background to I came to Foucault's Pendulum the way I imagine most of us do, through The Name of the Rose. That book I enjoyed so much I read twice in the same year, the second time aloud to the driver on long car trips, not easy when one remembers the plethora of languages one must pronounce, easy for me then as I was in the middle of a linguistics master's. I guess it would not be odd to expect something similar from this book, well researched in the extreme displayed in fascinating detail as background to a spellbinding plot. One might say two out three is not bad, and I could say that this book is not bad, except that it is so much worse and so much better than 'not bad'.
I loved being taken through the museum, both at the beginning and at the end. I love the playful creativity of the editors at the publishing house, producing irrelevant (and irreverent) courses for a non-existent university. That's how the quest started out, but along the way they lost the fun. They got serious, and the mischievous air became ponderous.
It's Umberto Eco, so of course we expect so much more. The research is overwhelming. In fact, I suspect this point is the core of the problem: having done so horrifically much research, Eco had to put it in. I understand. Otherwise it would be wasted, and who wants to waste good research? Except this research is names, dates, and places over and over again and even Umberto Eco can run out of ways of making such lists interesting. Conversations, discussions, arguments, letters, lectures – Eco even resorts to an actual list, nearly all of chapter 75 (only two-thirds through the tome), which our narrator tells us came about trying to make sense of a morass of research.
Alright, I get it. There are hundreds of thousands of connections one could make out of all this … stuff, so people do. I enjoy the spoof. I love how Eco laughs at us all for getting excited at all the amazing coincidences, because that's all they are – coincidences. There is no gigantic plot, no elaborate mystery. It is just life, going on as life does. I didn't need 640 pages to tell me that. ...more

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Jul 12, 2007 EdMohs rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a grand romp thru the soft parts of historical truths and hoped for truth. Sort of the UN-conspiracy of grand historical/esoterical\literary conspiracies. Subject dealt with well every thing that man as ever thought about life, universe, God, Mickey Mouse and more literary connections then one could ever imagine.
In depth anaylis of:
Knight Templars
Kabbala
Rosicrucian
Parcelus
Shakespeare
Greeks
Computers
ZANINESS!
Notonly does Eco turn history on it head he gives it meaning where ther was n ...more

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