Rating: 
Summary: Thought-Provoking but Somewhat Tedious
Review: This was a story that I gained much from on a personal level, but it did get a little hard to plunge through the more complex and dense parts. I recommend this book to anyone, though, because my life became simpler after reading this. If I can read anything I want to into the world, all I can say in the end is "It's so beautiful."
Rating: 
Summary: Tour de Force! Great for Juggling!
Review: I first spotted this raunchy little book at a party of about 40 or so of my peers. The party was pretty stagnant - very little in the way of interesting conversation or antics. It was then that I decided to pick up this book and begin juggling with it. Needless to say, I soon became the center of attention and the party improved markably! I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to adlib juggle in front of a large audience, or anyone who has problems staying awake while driving.
Rating:
Summary: fantasy and technology together
Review: I must admit that this novel is not so fascinating and capturing as _The name of the rose_. But maybe it is even more original.
Prof. Eco goes on in his research about nystery, lore and magic....but in this case a new event has happened. Eco entered the Multimedia world. This book includes at least four different themes: the detective story, the love affair, the gossip about the Academic complicated world and the sarcastic description of the publishing industry. And besides, a great protagonist...the computer.
This is a great discovery, but maybe it's a limit as well.In this book, Eco's narrative style often sonds desultory, abrupt. But Eco likes risk, and _The Pendulum_ is a challenge.
No wonder if so many Italian writers have imitated his example in teh latest twenty years.
Rating: 
Summary: oh, please let it end
Review: I felt like I was reading this book for a class test rather than for pleasure. I have two advanced degrees, and yet I still felt too stupid to read this book. I found myself lost in the details, and wondering...what is the point?!? The concept of the book was fascinating, which drew me to pick it up, but the execution was oh, so boring. I can't give this book a completely negative rating. When Umberto Eco wrote somewhat normally -- with a plot and characters, for instance, rather than page after page of mind numbing, pointless details -- I actually enjoyed the book and storyline. Although I found his references to "the Thing" revolting. I'm offended when people refer to a baby as "it"...but the Thing is revolting. It turned me against the protagonist...was that Eco's purpose? Can anyone recommend another of his books? I enjoyed the Name of the Rose but was put off by this endeavor (or is that not obvious?).
Rating:
Summary: The Poetry of the Pendulum
Review: Foucault's Pendulum is at once amusing, bewildering, ironic, exceedingly intellectual and extraordinarily beautiful. This adventure is a detective story about the search for the center of an ancient, still-living conspiracy of men who seek, not only power over the earth itself, but also over the psychic powers that abide on earth and who, ultimately, draw their pursuers into a circle of awareness where even the very discovery of truth proves to be lethal.Foucault's Pendulum can be inordinately difficult to follow; its encyclopedic richness of historical detail breaks any smooth transparency of prose, but then, this book was never meant to be easy. It is, however, a complex artifact of Eco's post-modern aesthetic at work in a traditional literary form: in this case a detective thriller. The narrator of Foucault's Pendulum is Causaubon, a scholar who writes his doctoral dissertation on the Knights Templar and who establishes himself in Milan as a sort of self-styled Sam Spade of information. For a price, he will track down any piece of information, even though he seems to know everything already (save for the fact that he is named for the scholar of George Eliot's Middlemarch). Causaubon accepts a job as consultant for the Garmond Press and joins Jacopo Belbo (a no-nonsense Piedmontese) and Diotallevi (an ex-foundling Piedmontese, who fancies himself Jewish). These three men spend most of their time drunk or bored, creating parodic word games and ridiculing anyone who takes himself too seriously. Belbo's favorite sentence is one he likes to use in the presence of pretentiousness, "Ma gavte la nata," which, loosely translated, means, "Remove the cork and let the wind out." Eventually this trio, in their research for a book entitled The History of Metals, advertise for manuscripts about the diabolical histories of secret societies. They decide, as a game, to feed all the hermetic plots that ever were into their computer. The results go beyond even their most paranoid fantasy: the unexplained phenomena of history, they find, can be fitted into a single, cosmic plan that embraces opposites. What every major society of Europe, from the thirteenth century onward, has always wanted to know is now in control of the Earth's "telluric currents," the psychic forces which control the land, seas and skies. An ultimate conspiracy, that synthesizes all possible conspiracies is uncovered. A plot is unearthed, though what the trio is now plotting against is not so precisely defined. Eco, however, is a professor of semiotics, a grand master of codes, signs and hidden meanings. The obsessiveness of his three Italians becomes contagious and soon, no single fact seems innocent. The truly remarkable thing about Foucault's Pendulum is how compelling "the Plan" can seem, even though the reader knows it to be false. It cannot be true, yet we remain engrossed as the word processor groups together facts with its random number generator. Any resulting coherence must surely be accidental. As we read, we become as obsessed and irrational as the book's trio, fabricating unlikely "ifs" in order to fit the missing pieces. When the last pieces finally do fall into place, we feel as exhausted as the novel's characters. The pendulum is question swings in the Conservatoire des Arts et Mètiers in Paris and is a twenty-eight kilo silver ball with a needle point, hanging by a wire from a fixed point on the ceiling sixty-seven meters above. It was invented by Jean Bernard Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. It swings perpetually, given momentum by the instability of the solid floor beneath. Although it seems harmless, by the book's end it takes a more than sinister turn. The poetry of the pendulum is the poetry of Eco's novel, and of history, itself. Eco writes his novel as Causaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi write their "Plan;" in order to rewrite history, a history of which they, themselves become a part. The pendulum looms over the lunacy, scorn and fear of the world because its point of attachment, alone in the universe is fixed, wherever you choose to put it. This "centeredness," so desired by the metaphysics of the cabalists's, by Italian scholars's cynicism, of poetry and history, are only possible because of the force which maintains the pendulum. This is, to say the least, a dense book. It takes more than six hundred pages to get from our first view of the pendulum to the last. These pages are crammed with information and not with action, but it is information that is fascinating to know and to read about. In the meantime, all three of Eco's heroes discover with alarm that neither their parody not their "Plan" can protect them from a universe ruled simultaneously by both and neither. Diotallevi is the first to meet a less-than-happy fate, Belbo is next, as, in the Paris Conservatoire, at midnight, in the pendulum room, he confronts his fiction-turned-reality. Causaubon's final monologue reflects the uncertainty with which he, too, awaits his final fate.
Rating:
Summary: Please.... read it!!!
Review: This is a must read book - a total masterpiece which draws you into the mystery of the Knights Templars with such force that you cannot put down the book untill you finished reading it!!! Join Casaubon and his friends in their great Plan which is filled with history, myths, legends, mystery and well-hidden secrets! Please, do so!!!
Rating:
Summary: Cheery little Hermetic romp
Review: Yes, indeed: Eco lays on the 'scholarly gobbledygook' with a trowel, here, and characterization in any real human manner is diverted by some unseen, vaguely alchemical, formula for life. There are a great many unnecessary details about Rosicrucians. In my opinion, that's the best reason to read it. If one is willing to set aside the desire for a traditional character-driven story and relax into the self-moving, arcane dimness of the world Eco presents, one will be showered--yea, showered--with both esoteric trivia and a pleasantly removed distance from the events transpiring. The persepective, for all its first-person accounting, seems rather more some goddish creature observing over the narrator's shoulder, and coolly and elegantly relating the news of the goings-on.
Rating:
Summary: Mindbending
Review: This book was recommended to me by a good friend, a young man with a masters' degree in Mod. Eur. History with a fantastic background in philosophy and economics. Half the read I could not stop laughing, the other half I had to go back again and make certain what the hell I was reading. Though I enjoyed the intertwining conspiracy theories and the characters, Eco kind of left me in a lurch at the end; no different than the feeling I had after reading "For Whom The Bell Tolls." Worth a second even read during a lazy summer vacation.
Rating:
Summary: Crusade through prose
Review: This is a great book, and by the end of the novel if your like me you will feel as if you have just been through a crusade of occult history. I must admit, it was hard going in places - the level of detail is nothing short of astounding. But it all comes together in the end, and I love the way the Eco leads you through all of this to end with a "joke" of sorts. Anyway, if your fed up reading traditional guff novels, give this a try - you may even learn something along the way.
Rating:
Summary: A magnificent, inclusive journey
Review: I won't pretend this book wasn't a hard slog. It was. It's long, dense and uses words I didn't know existed (and frequently, words that aren't English). But all this is necessary to create the thick, rich tapestry Eco weaves for us. With consummate style, we are taken on a journey of knowledge, culture, religion and philosophy that I, for one, experienced right alongside the book's characters. This book might not change your life, but it certainly changed the way I look at it. It's all what you make of it.
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