Rating: 
Summary: Wordy & pretentious,with no sense of pace, or story-telling.
Review: Unlike many reviewers of "Foucault's Pendulum", I loved Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". This book, however, is MUCH different. Eco loves to show off his vocabulary, and his obvious intelligence and research. In doing so, he makes the book convoluted and slow. People who like to read a book, analyze it, enjoying the grammatical structure and imagery, and the obscure references and rare vocabulary, will love this book. However, I read fiction for the STORY and for ENTERTAINMENT. Dan Brown's research may not be spot-on, but he tells one hell of a story. A real page turner. And if I want to know what the real facts are, I'll research them.To read an Eco book is a chore. I have enough chores in my life, I don't need another. The tangents he takes off on are irrelevant to the story, and detract so much from the flow of the book, I wanted to throw the damn thing across the room. The people who like this book are (no offense, and not in all cases) the same people who think all films are bad unless they are choc-full of symbolism, and must have sub-titles. I know many people like this. Now, keep in mind, I'm not exactly a brainless idiot that can't appreciate fine literature. I'm highly educated, and read TONS of books. Eco's book would be perfect for someone who wanted to read a chapter a week, and has time to investigate and study all the references held within that chapter. I don't have that time. And if I wanted to study textbooks, I'd read textbooks. However, on the positive side, Eco is obviously intelligent, does tons of research, and there is so much interesting information in this book, it'll make you want to research some of this stuff yourself. If, like me, you've read Dan Brown's books, and loved them, and want to read this book, I advise against it. The first paragraph alone will make you wonder what the hell he's talking about. It doesn't get any better. You have to wade through so many words, so many elusive references that aren't explained, and so many tangents that go on for so long, you forget where you are in the story. Of course, I respect the other opinions here, as well. I'm a "movie-lover" (Spielberg, Jackson), Eco's fans are likely "film-goers" (Fellini, Kurosawa). Therein lies the difference, perhaps. I shouldn't be overly harsh, I suppose. Foucault's Pendulum has some great content, and cool ideas. It is not without merit. I just don't think it will fit the bill if you're looking for a "page-turner" or a quick enjoyable read...
Rating: 
Summary: Reacquaints you with long lost parts of your brain!
Review: I was digging through Amazon's online version of a bookstore's "bargain bin" looking for something new to read. I came across Foucault's Pendulum and it sounded interesting enough. It starts out, the first 10 or 20 pages, quite convoluted and confusing. I remarked to my husband that perhaps this book was a bit "too cerebral" for me. But, I perservered and I am so glad I did! Yes, those that say the book starts slow- it truly does. But then, it opens up to this magnificent and complex universe of religious history, conspiracy theories, murder, mystery and suspense and keeps you wanting to read more. The vocabulary is intense and pretty advanced and there were, in fact, several words that I was unfamiliar with entirely- particularly those that were in LATIN (what was that about?) But, after sitting down with this book for a while, you feel that you have just worked out your brain. It's invigorating! I found myself having resurected a long-lost vocabulary that I almost forgot I even had! To sum it up- great book. Very intriguing, complicated, and, sorry for the cliche, "page turning" story. But, as an added bonus, it is extrordinarily thought-provoking and brain exercising! Highly recommend it to those of you that don't want your brain to turn into oatmeal in the lazy summer months.
Rating:
Summary: Eco's Ego.
Review: Thesaurasized, now there is an expression you don't hear everyday, much like every second word in this book, and to be honest most of them do not exist in reality either, this manuscript an interesting piece of literature, but I would read "The Name of the Rose" a hundred times over rather than go at this one again, and this is coming from someone who has actually read books like "The Trial of the Templars" by Malcolm Barber, Eco beckons us with the Templars' hidden mysteries, a theme that this novel deals with, in the last 150 pages of a book that is easily four times that size, 550 wordy-full pages, written as if Umberto has found a whipping boy he can use to convert a 100 paged novel into a huge piece of arcane knowledge via Thesaurasization, to be later transformed by time into an archaic must-read, possibly a contender next to James Joyce's Ulysses, but then why try to copy that style, the point being originality, but Eco does, and ends up binding a pointless beast of words, the pontificating of a good artist who has a healthy and vast knowledge of historical Italian events, coupled with multiple ways he can express this in terms of writing... goes off gallivanting into the world of muddy publishing, writers transfixed by politics, women, coffee shops and alcohol, brood over possible antediluvianismistic occult judiciousness as a message contained in the holy grail, THE MEANING OF LIFE, here it is according to Eco, obviously enjoying the fable he is creating while gadding about across the page in stuff he knows you will have to look up to understand, you will break often throughout the story and be all the more fed up with it, unless you have been diagnosed with longer life expectancy than most, then by-all-means, go for it.
Over the period of a couple of months I reached the end. I did not retain half of what was eluded at, nor did I begin to care much for it, as the pages just wasted time, making sense only that this is a story about publishers chasing the meaning of life through a series of odd events. There is no logical reason for this novel to run anywhere near its length unless a few enjoy that sort of thing, as some probably did, but to be honest I have found better elsewhere in shorter versions that said an awful lot more in less time. If that is what Eco is eluding to here in this text, then it is a 'point' that took a lot time to get to get across... and all of it Thesaurasized at that.
Praise to the five star reviews. I am happy you liked it. This one is fair warning for those who won't.
Rating: 
Summary: How did this become a bestseller?
Review: The topic is fascinating, the book is tedious. Endless description, with sometimes whole paragraphs detailing minutiae. There are some paragraphs that are nothing more than lists. There is description about the origins of the Templars, and their Plan, but this too often desolves into a scholarly dissertation rather than a novel. A better author could have culled two hundred pages off of this book and made a much more interesting book. It took about a hundred pages from him to set the hook, and then he didn't really return to it until 200 pages later. Was he getting paid by the page? It would seem so. It is an interesting story, but not worth the time and energy to invest for five hundred pages. Read the reviews instead.
Rating:
Summary: Slow is not bad.
Review: A lot of people seem to dislike this book because it is so dense, so full of references. That happens to be the reason I love it. What's so wrong about having to stop and look something up? That only enhances the reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: It's hard to get into the swing of this Pendulum
Review: This book was on my shelf for years but I finally got around to reading it after reading the DAVINCI CODE and ANGELS AND DEMONS. They have similar themes, but Foucault's Pendulum has a much larger point having to do with the search for meaning. The point is that the search itself is compelling, and the temptation of searching for secret meaning can become obsessive. But it's hard to get into the swing of PENDULUM. To get to that main point, Umberto Eco constructs a story that manages to pack speculation about just about every occult group and secret society in history into one unified theory. Are the characters discovering or creating their story? Or is their imagination producing reality? Or are they, or at least the narrator, simply delusional? I think that's what I was supposed to be wondering while reading the book. I was pleased with the ending, which though a little ambiguous did not turn out to be confirmation of magic or the discovery of a secret of secrets. Dark and mysterious figures seem small and petty by the end. Cleverly, Eco leaves us at a point where the narrator simply arrives at a new theory, which he had been doing throughout most of the book, so I suppose what's really going on could be just about anything, but at least the ending seems to be about human nature in this world.
Although I liked the ending, I had many problems with this book. First, it took far too long to get to the ending. I think Eco wanted us to ease into the characters' descent into obsession, so the first half of the book contains too much off-the-main-plot narrative. Then Eco wants to overwhelm us with scope, so he writes pages and pages and pages about obscure secret societies, some of which I had known something about, some of which I hadn't. Where Dan Brown introduces quasi-historical organizations like the Illuminati with a lot of explanation, Eco's characters talk about them as if everyone is already familiar with them (including many groups far more obscure than the Illuminati). I don't think Eco here is trying to be pretentious. I think he's trying to establish a murky atmosphere within which he has an easier time manipulating our recollection of myth and history. But wading through pages upon pages of disorienting uncertainty can be tedious.
Eco also has an annoying habit of switching styles. At first he writes in his deliberately disorienting way, then he has pages of clear exposition, then he breaks into fine print that is supposed to be the writing of one of his characters. This too is uncomfortable, and I found the style shifts to often kill the book's momentum.
Finally, though the mysterious figures surrounding the book's main characters are rendered more plausible as frauds by the end of the book, there is no plausible explanation of why the main characters are surrounded by so many frauds, in on a lesser version of their grand plot. I think this is supposed to add to the story's deliberate ambiguity, but I'm not sure and not entirely convinced.
Ultimately I was wrong to pick up with book after reading Dan Brown's books. Brown writes "page turner" thrillers, which this is most certainly not. The right way to come at FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM is to recognize it as a character-driven novel about human nature.
Rating:
Summary: Read on
Review: This is one of the few books that dwell so deep into a topic so mysterious. The book however does tend to go back in time and forward again, only in the last few chapters do you finally find out what has been going on, to a lot of people, this does not appeal. I have had some doubts in it while I was reading the book, but a little by little it got so interesting I couldn't put it down.
It is a heavy duty book that requires a lot of thinking, but I thought it so good that the hairs on my back rose as I read certain lines. If you have the book, for the sake of book itself, please finish it.
There are some phrases in the book that are in different languages, readers may wonder what they mean, but as I read, they do not hold significant meaning of the novel if the author did not explain it.
Rating:
Summary: Post-Modernity at Its Best!
Review: Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" is an amazing post-modern book. Though not quite as much fun as "The Name of the Rose," this work is a much more comprehensive and thought-provoking experience. Perhaps the biggest difference between this and Eco's first book is the (intentional) lack of a center. In "Rose" we feel comforted because there's always the monk Baskerville as our point of orientation and foment of rationality in an irrational world. However in "Pendulum" the very lack of one sure thing that we can put our faith into is the text's very theme. We're left with a mathematical point from which a pendulum swings above the Earth and that brief second in which a person can hold that same position.
If this doesn't make much sense, perhaps a comparison with Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" is in order. Both texts set out to do similar things - show the absurdity of making too many connections between facts. Does the fact that Jesus Christ and Joe Camp have the same initials mean anything? Not alone, but if you try to tie this together with other facts, you can end up with a whole theory of mumbo jumbo that says nothing about the outside world - only your internal interpretation. Pynchon, talking almost exclusively about how we read literature, stops here. Eco, addressing everything from literature to history, goes further showing how these flights of fantasy can then, in turn, affect the outside world - in other words, even if you make something up, somebody will believe you.
What's left is very Socratic - the wise man is he who knows that he knows nothing - or even more that there's nothing to know.
Thought-provoking, ground-breaking and well worth the effort. It's just not quite as much fun as stomping through the abbey with Baskerville.
Rating:
Summary: This book has changed my life
Review: One of the reviewers said here: "You'd better have an unabridged dictionary handy." This is because, unfortunately, books do not get published in US with notes and translations. I've read Umberto Eco's books in both English and Russian. I didn't have a problem with the Russian version of "Foucault's Pendulum" because it is normal for Russian editors to provide comments to every historical reference and Latin/Hebrew/whatever phrase. Too bad this is not done in US! Half of "The Name of the Rose" was losty for me because the Americal edition does not translate Latin.
These issues aside, this is one of the most turning books I have read in my life; it's an eye opener. I could not stop reading it. This book has sent me on wild runs through Europe during my vacations scouting great gothic cathedrals, places like Stonehenge, small steets in Paris, etc. Believe me, it changes the way you look at things. I walk into a cathedral with a very different feeling now. And even though Umberto Eco is a non-believer, and you realize you've been tricked in the end, the book continues to inspire me now (I read it 2 years ago). I will soon be ripe for re-reading it, after visiting many of the places mention in this book, and reading about all sorts of historical phenomena mentioned in the book. "Foucault's Pendulum" is a work that will present new layers to you when you come back to it over and over again.
Rating:
Summary: Will be read long after "DaVinci Code" and the like are dead
Review: It is much more tempting to write a bad review to vent a frustration of an unsatisfactory reading experience than to reward a good book with a good review. However today I managed to convert the urge to demolish a couple of mediocre specimens of modern fiction into a positive review about the
excellent Eco's book which stands so much higher than any recent cheap imitations. (I am sure that Amazon will appreciate one review with 5 stars more than 5 reviews with one star too.) By writing "Foucault's Pendulum" Eco proved that it is possible to blend the medieval legends about the Holy Grail with the satirization of the modern seekers in a way that is thrilling, entertaining and deeply satisfying at all levels. It is very fast paced in some places and slow in others just as it should be when the author cares about what used to be called artistic integrity and not just about record sales and screenplay royalties. This one will stay the test of time when some recent bestsellers made of cheaper fabric have faded away without trace.
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