Foucault's Pendulum

Rating:
Summary: The Joke Goes On Too Long
Review: Foucault's Pendulum first attracted my attention ten years ago when a professor I respected said he read Eco's novel and had no idea what was it was about. It took me over a decade to take up his implicit challenge, but I finally understand what he meant.

Not that the plot is hard to follow. In fact, FP starts off fast-paced: suspense combined with an intriguing dose of numerology. The Templars quickly enter the story, and the history Eco provides here is engaging and approachable.

Then comes the middle half of the book. Eco warns that the logic to be laid out in FP will be faulty, allowing the less ambitious reader to mentally skim much of the obscure history that follows. Although part of the fun is trying to figure out what is history and what is historical fiction, wading through paragraph-long lists of occult orders is less than stimulating.

When not caught up in pseudo-history lessons, Eco's style is inviting and his sense of humor is engaging. Broken into 120 chapters, FP is one of those novels where you can either convince yourself you have time to read just one more chapter, then one more, or instead struggle to get through to the end of a short chapter before falling asleep from boredom.

The last 100 pages of the book pick up again, and the plot moves along to a satisfying ending. After putting the book down, I am impressed that Eco has provoked me to consider such topics as religion, the meaning of life, the "knowledge is power" attitude of some colleagues, determinism/free will, etc.

I am glad I finally read Foucault's Pendulum. Still, I won't be buying The Name Of The Rose just yet. I need a little break from Eco right now.

Rating:
Summary: A mathematical puzzle
Review: A great mystery for those who have some interest in esoterica. Everyone and everything is in this book, the Knights Templar, the Jesuits, the Holy Grail, Masons, cabalists, Rosicrucians, Helene Blavatsky, the Compte St. Germain, William Shakespeare, Nazis, secret societies, Marxists, Brazilian spiritual practices & many others all woven together into a mysterious plot. I enjoyed it a lot but I think it's appeal is for a limited audience since you need to speak the language to get the joke.

Rating:
Summary: Druids and Masons and Jews, OH MY!
Review: If only I could get my friends who are wrapped up in new-age beliefs to read this book!!
I'm sure someone more intelligent than myself has already explained the premise of this novel ... so I'll stick to what I liked and didn't like about it.
The book eases the reader into the subterranean world of plots and counter-plots leading back to Joseph of Arimthea (and beyond). Up until this point, all I had learned of the Templars was what I had gleaned from the Indiana Jones trilogy. Eco coherently connects the Templars to a score of historically maligned secret societies from the druids to the Masons. He shows that all of accepted history can be reinterpretted through the lense of plots, real or imagined.
Just when the golem Eco created became too much for me to hold in my mind, he pulls back and puts the madness into perspective. In a wonderfull little speech, the narator's lover shows how the grand conspiracy can be just as convincingly explained by the human body. ... I think what Eco is trying to say (to me, anyways) is that we can constuct whatever history we need to justify our experiences--that the past is made and re-made constantly to suit our needs, and that no one history is more or less True than any other. Because the narator realises this, he is saved from his friend's fate in the end.

This book left me with something like the peace the narator finds, and that is its saving grace. Without that redemptive peace, it becomes the ravings of a madman, convinced that THEY are out to get him.

Rating:
Summary: YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
Review: Despite what other reviewers may say; Despite the praises that may have been sung; Despite the acclaim the author may have received; Despite all of this I loudly proclaim that this book STUNK! I truly believed if there was anything good to come out of this book, I could find it and I was sorely disappointed!

So you may ask, what was the problem? Well let me just tell you a few of the major problems...First, this book is probably the worst example of intellectual pointless rambling that I have ever happened across. Eco throws so many facts at you that you can grasp very, very few of them. And added to this is the fact that 90% of these facts are most assuredly BS! And the author has mixed in just enough facts with his fiction to be dangerous, thereby filling the world with people who may believe some of his fairy tales...dangerous. For example, Ecos dialogue on what motivated the holocaust is so foolishly concocted as to be on the verge of insane. Very dangerous to take a tragic event that is so alive in peoples memory and give the younger generation a reason to believe it was necessary! Another problem the book has it that it just never goes anywhere. Most of it is simply dialogue between a couple of guys who know many big words and have no clue how to put them together to make sense. Useless rambling I say! And the fact that every character is so unreal intellectually that it is laughable. Every person who speaks must have been a phD in every field because all of them had extensive opinions on everything. I have been to both Milan and Bologna (where the author lives and works) and believe me the people are not even close to as smart as this book makes it appear!

Anyway, sorry to ramble...I must have got that from Mr.Eco. Some of you eco fans may disagree but to the average person who is thinking of reading this book please don't...it is a waste of your time. There are too many classics out there written by authors who matter such as conrad, salinger, dumas, dickens, tolkien,...etc. Read one of their books!

Well you wanted the truth about the book and I am afraid if you are an eco fan you can't handle the truth! Pass this one by!!!

Rating:
Summary: What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive
Review: In many ways this novel lures the protagonist and reader into a tangled web of signs and clues, seemingly leading to some ultimate Truth. The web gradually appears before us as we progress through the chapters and its meaning deepens as we plod along. The detail provided often invites us to research further, to confirm our hunches and construct our own theories. Layers and layers of information are piled on top of one another so the weight of the task at hand becomes almost unbearable. At times I found myself rereading passages repeatedly looking for a clue in the sentence structure or chapter numbers. Towards the conclusion, my curiosity was at a peak.

Then the final chapters unfurled feeling like a B movie rather than a blockbuster. Eco somehow deflated all that curiosity in a matter of a few pages. Immediately I understood this was just a story. The novel I just worked through, devoted time and effort in understanding, ended rather melodramatically, "not with a bang but a whimper." It is ironic that so much detail was collected and expounded for such a pulp ending. I was dismayed ... at first.

After some reflection, however, it occurred to me that reading this novel is an exercise not unlike life. We are often searching for clues and signs on our way to some ultimate conclusion, and often we are disappointed by the results of our endeavors to find the Truth. The truth is that the pursuit defines who we are, not the goal. The meaning we derive in life comes from living, not death. We are curious about death; we are afraid of it, but we do not know it. Maybe in the end it will feel like a B movie. The only way to discuss or describe the ultimate Truth is via drama, not facts. I think this novel is worth pondering not simply for its story, but also for its storytelling. It offers a humbling experience and challenges much of what we take for granted.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: It is a fantastic read. For anyone who likes books on the weird side. Just read it. Words can not describe this story. It starts out a little slow but it builds to a mysterious middle and strange end. Reading this book and fully understanding it the first time around is not possible there will always be something you don't quite understand. When you do finish it you will be satisfied.

Rating:
Summary: Somebody take away this man's library card
Review: A pedantic mudbath of fiction, fact and distorted truths so densely packed that spearating each of these would take months of research.
But that is the least of the problems with this book, the story doesn't really begin until page 142. For the first 141 pages you will be assaulted by lecture after lecture after lecture of Umbault recanting history and describing ancient religous rites.
After that, stodgy dialog, predictable plodding and no sex.
The awful teaching he gives us is drearily accomplished for example when one character asks the other 'well tell us about the Templars' and then you get 5 or 6 pages of Templar history. Very little is revealed in the way of conflict, information is thrown at you like a piss pot from a window, exposition ad urineum.
To be fair, 3 or 4 more rewrites and I think this might be a good 260 page read, right now it works well as a door stop for my study bringing in a nice cool breeze from the Adriatic.

Rating:
Summary: Addictive
Review: I really don't want to say too much about this book, for fear of giving too much away, but...

Having read a lot of books over my life, this is one of the few ones that I really was unable to put down once I started - it is absolutely fascinating, and completely addictive.

If you don't know Eco's writings, you are in for a treat with this one.

Rating:
Summary: Among the more brilliant acts of historical revisionism ever
Review: There are going to be those who say that this book is so full of conspiracy theory and occult history that it becomes a book of conspiracy in its own right and fails to be a novel. Those who say so are wrong. This book is a book of ideas, but the ideas themselves become the story.

The first half of the book is a intricate, disjointed, and yet ultimately beautiful stage set for what follows. It follows the adult life of the protagonist, Causabon, which becomes a patchwork of bizarre episodes that seem unrelated, but fit just enough together that both he and the reader seek some fixed point, some hidden design in whose context they all make sense.

This biography is interspersed with Causabon's reflections on the tragic childhood experiences of his acquaintance and later friend Jacopo Belbo, who feels his life is marked by always being an observer rather than an actor, who laments having had so few opportunities to prove himself to himself and having failed to seize such opportunites as he had.

After this elaborate beginning, the book begins the task of constructing the secret history of the world from the fourteenth century onward. Belbo and Causabon, along with the gentile-turned-cabalist Diotallevi, become involved in a publishing house's scheme to fleece crackpot theorists by allowing them to self-finance the publication of their work. As a result, they are forced to read mountains of intolerably bad manuscripts and begin a game of creating the Plan, a history of the world in which all the crackpots' claims could actually be true.

Here, the book shines. Even if you didn't know about the events that become incorporated into the Plan before you began reading, the style and skill with which Eco imposes order on the chaotic reality that has been the last 600 years of the western world will leave you continually reading, longing for the next bizarre plot twist, and wondering if this hidden history might not actually be true. Its elements range from the hilarious (while Shakespeare did not write his own plays -- that honor belongs to Edward Kelley -- he did write those of Francis Bacon) to the convincingly absurd (the uneven implementation of the Gregorian calendar across Europe was no accident, but the machination of an embittered grandmaster of the Templars to obstruct his own order's secret plan) to those of blatantly bad taste (the Holocaust was actually a coverup for Hitler's quest for the final piece of a centuries-old riddle, but this in turn was all a mistake, because someone had mistranscribed Israel for Ismail along the way, and it was actually the Arabs, not the Jews, who possesed the riddle's answer), but at each turn the Plan becomes a little bit more convincing, a little bit more real than reality.

By the time the end comes, you've had so much fun being led along this crooked path, that when Eco turns didactic in the last ten pages, it is eminently forgivable. If the whole novel is an enormously elaborate excuse for an attack on the excesses of decontructionist philosophy and criticism, then let the world contain more such excuses.

Rating:
Summary: An addictive, intelligent rollercoaster ride
Review: Anyone who thinks Foucault's Pendulum is not a good book is pouting because they found it difficult to read. But it is NOT difficult to read--it was for me a blazing good time, the single best book I have ever read, the most fun. For anyone with even half a brain, for anyone who likes satire, for anyone who ever thought they knew everything, for the curious, the thoughtful, the philosophical, for those who don't like to be lulled by the same-old same-old, READ THIS BOOK. (By the way, the construction of the book (plot, etc...) is not traditional, which is probably why people use words like choppy, but it is one of the things that make the book as exciting as it is)