Foucault's Pendulum

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Summary: Nothing is real but everything could be...
Review: Three editors go on a mental trek to rediscover and revise the history of the world based on the writtings of people who could be considered credible and others that could have zero credibility at all. As they do, they unravel a massive web of conspiracies orchestrated from the depths of history to the present day by innumerous secret societies and underground groups poised to control the world and take over. These "societies" often clashing amongst themselves and often figments of imagination of others (but how can we really know) take the three protagonists around the world as they search for more and more data to put together their story. And the more data that piles in the more the truth becomes a blur.
As the story spins, they, and we too, do not know which of their "facts" are real and which aren't. For some the devices are not available to test their authenticity, and for others, the suspicion lingers that strategically placed false information has been laid in their path to throw them off track.
But the worst element for the three investigators is the very real possibility that some of the "facts" could be mere inventions of their own brains! Thus, they constantly need to investigate themselves too to keep their story in check. But how easy, or rather, how feasible is that?
"Foucault's pendulum" is a book that spans over 650 pages, and a story that many people have found exhausting or even pointless. But if you had to attempt yourself to write a story with the outcome and the "moral" of this one then it would be very probable that you'd need a build-up as long and as "exhausting" as Ubmerto Eco here does.
Allthough i could agree with some that this incredible novel is at times "exhausting", i totally understand the need for its structure and length.
Eco deals with more than just a story here. The way we perceive reality and how we are sometimes led to perceive it is a topic that bears no borders. Which, probably explains why 100s of books have been written on the subject.
Is there a conspiracy by secret societies to control the world? Hmm, who are you to answer, and, if there is, why do you imagine that these "societies" would let you know? You are enlightened? Says who? And what if it's all in your brain? If it is indeed "all in your brain" how would you be able to know?
How much "knowledge" and how many "facts" rest in your cerebrum about which you cannot trace the track by which they got there? How much of the "history" you know and have been taught can you actually prove for yourself?
And even if you set out to prove it for yourself, could you?
How easy is it really to separate truth from lie? I say it's not that easy. And if it's not that easy, then, wouldnt those who hold power and know this too, try to use this little fact to their advantage?
Wouldn't they try to use that as a device to manipulate, brainwash, mislead and misguide, whole peoples for their dark goals? Common sense would dictate that yes, but then, if common sense is really "common" why is it so uncommon to begin with?
Hmm..
To cut a long story short, this is a tremendous book. Yes it demands your dedication, but for good reason. Yes, it might not be for everyone (and judging from other reviews i read) it obviously isn't but, so what? Good things are by definition not for everyone, especially in days like these where intraterrestrial intelligence is becoming more rare than the white eagle.
This incredible rollercoaster of a book takes you deep back with a time machine, thrusts you back...forward, plays with your mind, plays with its own mind, and climaxes in its last 100 pages to the question troubling us all:
what is real?
While you might attempt to think about it, excuse me while i go get paranoid.
Umberto Eco is without a doubt one of the sharpest thinkers of our time. But on second thought, who's to say??

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Summary: Is It Real Or Is It The Templar Plan?
Review: A theme running through all of Eco's novels is the ambiguity between text and reality.

In _Foucault's Pendulum_, the "text" is a convoluted plan to do... something. Take over the world, maybe. This plan may have been hatched by the Templars, prior to their dissolution some seven hundred years ago. Or maybe the plan was entirely hatched by three editors in a publishing house, speculating on historical possibilities and arcane canards.

Certainly, people around the editors act and react as if the plan had some substance, as if the goal of the plan were some object of incredible value. Value great enough to kill for. And so the book proceeds on two levels: the editors reconstruct history and the editors battle occult forces who may represent the partisans of the Templar plan, or who may believe that the editors are the Templars.

For me, the most interesting part is the historical reconstruction -- among other things, it's a great parody of books like _The Hiram Key_. But the part narrative and the present narrative can't be separated that easily, and the whole is quite gripping.

So it's not an ordinary whodunit and you shouldn't expect it to end like an ordinary whodunit. Eco is a great writer and an interesting thinker, and if you come without expectations of reading a pulpy thriller I think you'll really enjoy this book.

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Summary: A funny expose of the occult
Review: For those who believe or nearly believe that the world has been ruled by a secret group of benevolent (or maybe not) conspirators, you have got to read Foucault's Pendulum. The Knights Templar. Esoteric alchemy. The Priory of Sion. The Trilateral Commission. The Kennedy assassination. You will howl at Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotalevi as they roam through the looking glass and into the wonderland.

In short, there ain't no such things as those above, and if they were, the bunch of nuts wouldn't be ruling anything.

Eco is a student of James Joyce.

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Summary: It's all part of the Plan
Review: The first Eco book I'd read before this one was The Island of the Day Before and this one is so much better than I find it hard to believe the same person wrote both. The reason I wasn't so fond of the previous novel was because it felt more like an academic exercise than an actual book, I had no emotional connections to the characters, who felt more like mouthpieces for the author to debate what he thought were clever ideas. At that point I wondered what exactly people had thought so highly of this Eco guy. Then I finally read this book. Now I'm officially impressed. The sense of humanity that was sorely lacking from The Island of the Day Before is here in spades, as well as the dense academic stuff to keep all those scholar types happy. It doesn't hurt that there's an actual plot here, though be warned, the pacing is slooowwww. Most people have noted that the book starts out quickly enough, I think it starts too slow and the beginning, with its overly descriptive writing and rather ponderous imagery, nearly stopped the book dead for me. But once you get over the hurdle of the first few chapters and the book really starts getting into gear. The eventual premise is that a bunch of guys who are reading manuscripts on secret societies and hidden plots decide as a joke to try and connect it all . . . and then people start believing them. The novel successfully weaves the characters' lives into the academic threads and over the course of the many hundreds of pages the story alternates between minor character study and circus quality academic feats. The middle portion is what most people have trouble with, once the characters start trying to invent their Plan, the book turns into a lot of historical discourse, some of which may or may not be true . . . I didn't care either way and enjoyed just watching the characters make all the connections, since I wasn't reading the book for a history lesson, no matter how well Eco knows his stuff. But when the book dispenses finally with the bulk of the Plan and gets back into a plot of sorts, it becomes almost suspenseful and highly entertaining and by the end, even extremely moving. Eco's writing can take some getting used to, most of the time his prose is more clever than poetic but it's highly readable for the most part and once in a while he pulls some surprisingly beautiful passages out. The choppy structure of the novel helps too, the short chapters breaking the story up nicely and forcing the reader to digest the story is gigantic chunks of text at a time. So I'm finally starting to see why everyone thinks this guy is so great, if you're not obsessed with fact checking all the historical details and are just along for the ride, this book can be great fun (the dialogue is fairly witty and Belbo's password made me laugh out loud for several minutes) and will read faster than you might think of a book this size. And they say The Name of the Rose is better. Should be fun. But for those who like their books dense and heaped with historical detail, then this is quite recommended.

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Summary: moby dickish
Review: It was almost a chore to get through the middle portion of this book; lots of extra detail and happenings that are far from what I'd consider important to the overall plot. The end was very anticlimactic. Nonetheless, the story concept was very interesting. After having the same kind of reaction to the Illuminatis trilogy, I think if you liked them, you'd like this book, though this book is a little more realistic, as far as world domination conspiracies go.
I don't plan to read another Eco book.

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Summary: Spirit and Science...
Review: Foucault's Pendulum is not an easy read, but it is a gratifying venture for those willing to resist the seduction of the artificial separation of science and spirit to which modern Westerners have become addicted in the last 200 years.
Eco ostensibly weaves his story within the matrix of the Kabbalah-an ancient Jewish mysticism which seeks to reconcile all aspects of human experience through the study of the energies which inspire them. The chapter headings themselves are indicators of specific mystical concepts. Upon first inspection, the reader may fail to grasp this correspondence between Eco's story and Jewish mysticism.
Indeed, a familiarity with the Kabbalah may help one to better appreciate Eco's juxtaposition of the skeptical mechanism of the scientific Jean Bernard Leon Foucault and the elegance of thought displayed by the more contemporary philosopher Michel Foucault. The cosmology of Foucault's Pendulum is an amalgamation of time and mind which is informed by the vision of both Foucaults.
It is not necessary, however, for the reader to carry out in-depth research to appreciate Foucault's Pendulum. While it does allude to an arcane Jewish mysticism, Eco's story must stand on its own-even for the reader for whom the beliefs are unfamiliar.
Eco's writing style is intricate, and his ideas complex. He uses this to great effect in presenting a world which is neither simple nor straightforward, creating a story which is challenging and vivid. Eco skillfully reconciles the mystical world with the scientific, and indeed creates a world in which the artificial distinction ceases to exist.

Eco's Pendulum forces one into the nascent space there at the apex of the pendulum's swing...
...and invites one to figure out how to live there.

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.

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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.

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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!!!