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: A wild ride through history
Review: The story starts simply enough; a veteran of the Foreign Legion appears in the office of three young Milanese editors with a crazy tale of having discovered a coded message almost a thousand years old, involving the Knights Templar and Stonehenge, which when decoded will unleash a mystic source of power that is greater even than nuclear energy. Oh yeah? say the editors; well, we'll go one better, we'll make a Plan of our own. And they proceed to do so, by feeding bits and pieces of fact and fancy into a computer named Abu (for Abulafia, the medieval Jewish cabalist): the secrets of the Great Pyramid, the Knights Templar's initiation rites; Rosicrucian lore, and a few hefty sprinkles of Brazilian candomblé. Hey, it's great fun and they're only playing a game, after all... until they discover that the game is playing them and they've unleashed a terrifying force they can neither harness nor understand. Umberto Eco is not a so-called "popular" writer and this book is not for anyone looking for an easy read. It has more twists and turns than a Chinese puzzle; it's dense, packed full of historical facts and references, and zips across time and geography until the reader has to slow down and reorient himself. Eco takes over 600 pages to get where he's going, but for those who stay with it, it's a wild, crazy joyride leading up to a slam-bang conclusion. It's fun, it's fascinating, and it's a learning process all in one. What else can you ask of a great book?
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)
Rating:
Summary: I liked it...really
Review: Okay, this is not a book for those who love plot, suspense and excitement. Eco does tell an interesting story at bottom, but one has to wade through pages of esoteric beliefs, occult history and words that (as one reviewer noted) aren't even in the dictionary. The extent that one enjoys this book may depend on how much appetite one has for pure, unadulterated, obscure knowledge. And I tend to enjoy that kind of thing, although the background history (involving the Templars, Rosicrucians, Jesuits and everybody else in history) eventually got too complex for me to follow. The last few pages did save it though, with some keen reflections on the nature of meaning and truth. I liked this book enough to recommend it to those hardcore literary warriors who like a challenge, but not to those wanting a quick thriller. It's not.
Rating:
Summary: The back cover doesn't do this book justice
Review: This book is not as good as The Name of the Rose. That said, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, once it gets rolling, is a brilliant demonstration of the power of history, the temptation to find connections between historical coincidences, the power of knowledge (so unappreciated in America today), and the willingness of people to believe in entire plans dreamt up as games and jokes. This story is one of ideas more than action.
The back cover of this book does the story no justice and makes it seem uninteresting. One fundamental assumption, if it may be called that, is that perhaps scientific knowledge and modernism is an unlearning of a more ancient, mystical, and true wisdom. Read this book if you want to think and learn about what history means for individuals, societies, and nations.
While there are slow parts in the beginning, Eco had me almost believing in the Plan dreamed up by the Templars who have been manipulating history since their disappearance to realize their ultimate goal of world domination.
Rating:
Summary: An Italian James Fennemore Cooper
Review: This book was a total waste of time. It reads like something that would have been written by James Fennemore Cooper. That is to say it takes a bulldozer to plow through it. Like another reviewer, the best part was finishing it. I thought it would get better as I went along, but I was wrong. It was difficult to absorb anything from it. The only reason I completed it was to say I finished it. Even at page 500 or 642 I thought of giving up. Possibly the worst book I've ever read. I will never read anything by Eco again, even though I enjoyed The Name of the Rose.
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