Rating: 
Summary: Read the book and get a life!
Review: If you've read the other reviews on this site, you know that Umberto Eco's book touches on nearly every conspiracy theory, cult and secret society in history. As a former editor, I smiled at the premise of editors taking a holiday from their normally critical objectivity and hijacking the nearest computer to create their own fantastic conspiracy. I won't travel the same ground as the other reviewers. I will say that this book works well as a mystery and a history lesson. It's fun to read, although the material is often challenging. Trying to keep all of the historical factors straight is no easy task, and Eco's writing style makes the reader work hard for the payoff. Fortunately, the payoff is worth the time and trouble. Simply put, Eco seems to make the case that no matter how far out and ridiculous a conspiracy theory is -- even one created as a joke -- there are plenty of lunatics out there willing to believe it. Just look around you at the people so desperate for an identity that they pose as modern-day witches, "channel" Shirley MacLaine through their toaster or fancy themselves the reincarnation of Nostradamus. Please read this book and remember it next time someone tries to sell you on a new Kennedy conspiracy, UFO hoax, secret code that unlocks the universe or the latest New Age fad. Belief in such nonsense has more to do with the weakness and desperation of the believer than it does with hard facts. I'm not worried that someone is controlling our lives; I'm worried that too many lives are out of control.
Rating:
Summary: Irony, Obession and Wit
Review: Packed with intrigue, philosophical puzzles and metaphysical conundrums, Eco uses his astounding knowledge of history and language to gently, and mercilessly, poke fun at pseudo-medievalism and new age conspiracy theory. The story centres around three book editors, all impoverished refugees from the time when useless learning was still revered, start scratching a living from editing the sort of books that appear in the kind of shops that sell reproduction native American dream-catchers. Bored with reading too many badly-written manuscripts, they decide to use all of them to cook up an elaborate conspiracy theory surrounding the mythic Knights Templar. Things go wrong when the Occultists they are satirising abandon their essential oils and druidic romps in the woods to chase after them, thinking that our heroes have, by underhanded erudition, stumbled on the Great Secrets of the Universe. With a full cast of sorcerers, magi, immortals, intellectuals, cabalists and beautiful women, Eco combines astonishing erudition and a wicked sense of irony. The novel is, in essence, a deeply moving observation of obsession, and Eco careful exposes the human lust for the Secret Society and Ancient Wisdom as nothing more than a petty, and futile, lust for power: all the great secrets that the occultists kill for are illusions and hoaxes. The book also carries an interesting sub-theme of linguistic philosophy: language is the world we live in, and to manipulate it is to manipulate the fabric of the universe. It stands alongside Voltaire and Swift as a great philosophical tale. This book is the perfect antidote of you have, like young acolytes of most religions, become disillusioned with the New Age Movement and all the rest of it: Foucoult's Pendulum is a savage, but most efficacious, remedy.
Rating: 
Summary: Wasn't good 15 years ago, and hasn't aged gracefully
Review: Eco would surely make a poor poker player--the poor guy can't hide his emotions and feelings, especially as it relates to alternative interpretations of Religion. As this book plods along, the reader gets a really good sense that Eco has some unbridled disgust for anti-establishment. Well, it shows, as by the end of the book, he is literally mocking these anti-establishment folks. I was hoping to not have to sift through Eco's pretentious word choices and sentence structure. Thankfully I did not. Instead, I was visited with "name drop blitzkreig". In other words, Eco just threw one name, group, ancient location, etc. after another. Was it to impress? I have no idea, but most of it didn't move the plot forward. Eco at least had a good subject matter for his plot, I can give him that much. The way to get to the conclusion, however, was muddled with a lot of nonesense and unnecessary verbage.
Rating:
Summary: "The Da Vinci Code" for the Mensa set
Review: This is a maddening, dense, and often incomprenhensible text, and come the final chapter, you might wonder if you've only been chasing Hitchcock's fabled MacGuffin. But for the pure joy of a book that will send you scrambling equally for the dictionary and the encyclopedia, I can't recommend "Foucault's Pendulum" highly enough. Altho' the book takes place in the present, the main characters are delving into a liturgical and literary mystery that ranges across the centuries to include Rosecrucrucians, Templars, Cathars, Crusaders, Jesuits, Freemasons...basically any vaguely shady offshoot of medieval Catholicism. Not only are the protagonists investigating this mystery, they are also INVENTING the mystery as they go, discovering that their own farfetched speculations are either actually true or are being misinterpreted as true by a Neo-Gnostic group who are anxious to get their hands on the mystical lost treasures of the Knights Templars. The book covers much of the same territory as Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" and in fact, both books very nearly end in the geographic location with the same infuriating lack of closure. But whereas the "Da Vinci Code" is basically a car chase with a Bible, "Foucault's Pendulum" sits quietly under the library lamp, in the quiet pursuit of the unknowable, and the ending--like Thomas Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49"--leaves the reader teetering upon the brink of revelation.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting premise, weak writing
Review: I recall reading 'War and Peace,' and realizing at some point that the underlying thesis of the book was to discredit Napoleon. In 'Foucault's Pendulum,' Umberto Eco essentially writes a harsh invective at people obsessed with the occult; those people who take everything in the past, present, and future, and aligns it with their fringe creeds. Eco's efforts fall far short, however. A frequent problem occurs when a scholar writes a novel centering on his/her area of academic expertise: that is, all characters seem to become mouthpieces of the author, all afflicted by the author's own weirdness. In 'Foucault's Pendulum,' the characters all had the same voice and personality (i.e. that of Eco himself). Eco fails to have this obsessed adventure into the occult interface with the normal world; all characters are self-contained in this nonsensical delirium Templars and Rosicrucians and Druids and Cabalists. Having a more detached interest in such subjects, I never cared about any of the characters. The characters were unidimensional, nonhuman, not believable, and their presentation lacked any psychological astuteness. There was no (credible) portrayal of love, hate, good, evil; there was no interesting or meaningful conflict or resolution. The rare portrayals of envy are simple and not sustained. Eco's writing is a veritable catalogue of obscure names, places, events, and arcana all linked in some way with the occult. Early in the book I was captivated enough to try and confirm or corroborate some of his references. Later on I didn't care. Eco's complete lack of economy and judgement perhaps illustrates the faults of his characters, but it is so excessive and unfiltered that it just becomes cumbersome. In the end, despite the promise of his thesis and themes, I felt 'Foucault's Pendulum' lay somewhere between a work of shameless vanity on Eco's part (i.e. 'look at how much I know') and the ramblings of an idiot savant that can do no more than list hundreds of names from history. Eco seems to have tried writing a vast senior thesis in the first person, without accomplishing much more than presenting his bibliography.
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.
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