Rating: 
Summary: great plot, too heavy on detail
Review: A great plot, but becomes weighted down with detail and information. For a religious thriller that moves quickly, and with just enough historical detail, try a new novel-- THE GOAT WITHOUT HORNS...
Rating:
Summary: A book to savor again and again
Review: Some books are to be read quickly, enjoyed and discarded. This is definitely not one of those books. It is dense with ideas and forces the reader to think. This is a book to read, think about,then put on a shelf to be brought down later to experience again. The premise of the story is clever - three bored editors decide to play a game. They string together the bizarre conspiracy theories they have heard and possibly stumble on the real thing. This has been done before in other books and movies. What make this different is the amount of information layered in the story. This book has lead me to many late night internet searches.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: Umberto Eco always impresses by his deep knowledge about unusual subjects. This book is about the occult. And the industry that is around it, especially literary. The story is built in a crescendo involving all kinds of conspiracy theories and unknown rites and secret societies, real or only hinted. It goes from the Templar Knights to the Brazilian Umbanda in a narrative so strong that you don't feel like leaving the book even for a second. In scientific theories, once you accept the postulates, everything else follows. The book is constructed exactly in this fashion. You naturally accept the premises. They are almost obvious, but, in the end, there is not much out there for us.
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Summary: Arcane wiseguys cook up plot, get squashed
Review: Three men in Milan, working in a small publishing house that produces works on the occult, the esoteric, and the downright bizarre, decide to recast world history in terms of a Plan. Why they do this is part of Eco's most unusual novel. FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM is not an action novel, though there are some gripping action passages; you do not find sex to any degree, nor is there much development of characters' psychology in the usual sense of that phrase. This is an enormous compendium, a vast vat of olive oil in which you may dip the bread of your curiosity. It is a semiotics text masquerading as a novel. Swirls of madness, esoterica, the weird, and the twisted logic of paranoid history fill the pages with a tongue-in-cheek talent that very few authors could manage. On page 386, the narrator-one of the three planners---says, "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." Eco's parody of occult writing borders on this itself. The three cross this boundary and realize their picture is true even though it was meant to be a parody. Did their efforts create the reality or was that reality extant all the time ? We witness the concoction of an insane explanation of European Man's activities over the last thousand years or more, an attempt to deny common sense and objectivity in favor of mysteries, plots, counter-plots, and secret cabals. The secret document which sends them off in these paroxysms of paranoid plotting could be one handed down from the mysterious Knights Templar of Crusader times. Or else, it could be a 14th century merchant's delivery list---hay, cloth, roses. There is a well-known American artist, Joseph Cornell, who created works of art from small, unusual items placed in tiny pigeon-holes inside a large frame. Eco's work reminds me of that. Where else could you find, side by side, in an amazing soup of crazy ideas, such different things ? Rosicrucians. Hitler. the Holy Grail. Trumpet dreams and cabbage soup. Occultism run amok. The Druidic College of Gaul. Masonry. Numerology. The hollow earth theory. Shiism and the Assassins. Bacon, Shakespeare, and Cervantes and all their ghost writers. The Tsarist secret police. Ayers Rock (Uluru). Old maps. Kabbala of cars (the motor, axles, etc. as the Tree of Sefirot !) Macumba. Manifestoes. Sepulchres. Alchemy. Heresy. Immortality. Rare books. Luminous wheels in the sea. Enigmas. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Mages. Secret brotherhoods. Jesuits. Menhirs. Minnie Mouse. The golem. Greek migrations into Yucatan. Tauroboliastes. Telluric currents. Self-financed authors. Osmognosis. Queen Elizabeth I. The Gregorian calendar reform. And I'm just scratching the surface here. "History is a Master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist." I think this is a kind of pseudo-Zen dictum, but FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM will certainly give your brain a run for its money. Is history what we think it is? Why ? Maybe the book isn't for everyone. You need a bit of patience to wade through all the crazy theories, and rabid reasonings, trying to connect all the signs and symbols to the real world outside the book. As the characters muse early on, there are four kinds of people in this world---cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. Let us add the fifth-those who can read FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM. I must be one of them.
Rating: 
Summary: A waste of time
Review: A friend gave me this book, along with the comment that it gets better after the first 50 pages. I've now made it through 112 pages. From the beginning I have been impressed with the translator. He or she has an incredible grasp of the English language, and I hope the grasp of Italian is just as incredible. He/she has an amazing skill for taking a word or idea in Italian and translating it into an obscure English word that will be understood by few English speakers. Thus a book that is slow paced and unintriguing is given yet another obstacle. It is possible that the book does have an incredible ending. I'll never know. No matter what the ending, the pain of getting to it cannot be worth the time and agony of getting there.
Rating:
Summary: Read the book and decide for yourself
Review: Forget all those who say the book is to long or self-congratulatory. In the amount of time you spent reading the various Amazon reviews of this book, you could have gone through at least 5 of its chapters. I will admit that the first time I read the book, I'd keep falling asleep, and that it took a friend to make me persevere to the end. The end is worth it. The people who thought the book too verbose or inanely descriptive obviously did not get to the last chapter, or they didn't understand it. There is a point to the deluge of historical and secret-society facts. If you know as much as Umberto Eco does, you'd write a book like this, too. When you read this book, consider the hundreds and thousands of veils and superfluous garbage we create and wade through every single day in the quest for self-validation, and then think of the one true thing.
Rating:
Summary: Too many side tracks
Review: I read this book several years ago. This was an awful book; not on a conceptual basis, but on a "let me try and explain it to you in 25 words or less". Where was the editor? Certainly you could not stand in front of a classroom and try and explain it the way the author does or, as the translator. My advice is just skip it. There are many other books out there that delve into the same type of secret society schtick.
Rating:
Summary: superb
Review: Stimulating throughout. FP is to "Da Vinci Code" as Tintoretto is to Hanna-Barbera.
Rating:
Summary: A "renaissance" book in the full meaning
Review: When I say "renaissance" I mean an all-encompassing exploration of knowledge from many fields. This is an intriguing work, and the reader catches on about 2/3 of the way through. Once again, Eco has combined real history with maybe history and certainly false history to create a stunning work. History, science, literature, music, architecture - all are woven into his scheme. This is one of those rare works where getting there is half the fun. Suspend your imagination and enjoy
Rating:
Summary: Eco, it's been far too long
Review: What a marvellous book! I first read it when I was a kid, probably 15 or so, and had no idea what to make of it. I've since then re-read it three or four times, and every time I find something different to love about it. The language, the characters, the flashbacks, the history (and the fictional history)... above all the huge conspiracy theory and the creation that becomes real... It's a great book, but make no mistake, it takes a lot of time and effort to read. Forget history, forget dictionaries and encyclopedias -- just read the book, and enjoy it.
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