Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Foucault's Pendulum
Book Review: A chapter, or twenty, too far
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm sorry but I cant agree with the majority of your reviewers. I found this book too long and without direction. Like his other "grand opus" "The Name of the Rose" it suffers from an over proliferation of detail and in the final analysis is just downright boring. The conclusion seems to have been plucked from thin air and cannot possibly be taken seriously. After the middle 300 pages of waffle I suppose the author was desperate for a climactic ending. (It didn't work!). Don't give up the day job Umberto.Book Review: A fascinating series of revelations
Summary: 4 Stars
Foucault's Pendulum is as thought-provoking as his other works, and even more accessible than The Name of the Rose or The Island of the Day Before.
The plot is a narrative told by the apprentice character, Casaubon (similar to Melk in Name of the Rose) who meets Jacopo Belbo, a cynical man working for a corrupt publisher. The story, however, does not dwell much on the current lives of those 2 and the third member of their team (Diatollevi, a self-styled Cabalistic Jew).
Instead, the story focuses, through a series of circumstances, on the Knights Templars and the secret that they have hidden and which, it seems, men have been plotting, killing and warring to find out for the past several hundred years.
It seems that the Templars possessed a knowledge, an artifact, a weapon so strong it could move continents -- it had, in fact, been the likely cause of the destruction of Atlantis, among other historical incidents.
The plot, although difficult to understand in detail without taking notes, is incredibly absorbing: the 3 men find out such coincidences throughout history that they are sure they are well on the way to figuring out the Templars' secret, despite their contempt for the lunatics who are after the secret and their own growing inability to distinguish "reality" from the fiction they believe themselves to be creating.
The story revolves around a few seminal semiotic concepts, which appear in Eco's other stories as well: Power, secrets, words and the Other. He also brings a heavy dose of mystic symbolism and Medieval history, including the Knights Templars, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, early Christianity, the Jesuits, the Druids and the builders of the Eiffel Tower and the Paris Metro.
By the end of the book, the reader is taken up in the plot, and starts to believe the Plan as thoroughly as the triad of plotters.
This is one of the rare books that not only tells an engaging fiction but also a philosophical treatise that teaches the reader and can change his or her perspective on life.
A good knowledge of French and Latin will help the reader, as well as a good background in Eco, Semiotics and/or Templarism/Masons/medieval occultism.
Book Review: A fascinating yet overdrawn novel
Summary: 4 Stars
Eco is a brilliant storyteller, and this novel conveys very powerfully how some people are drawn into a spiral of insanity and destruction by their fascination with the possibility of achieving arcane knowledge. Well written and at some points hilariously funny, the book succeeds as a rationalist's take on occultism. But Eco should have stuck to that story. The intermittent allusions to Belbo's childhood in fascist Italy and the main character's university days are interesting in their own right but do not always fit well into the novel and at times rendered it disjointed and tedious. In the end we get a novel that tries to cover too much ground but gets to raise some wonderful points about humanity's benighted quests for ultimate meaning.Book Review: A funny expose of the occult
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Book Review: A joke book for the gods
Summary: 5 Stars
Eco is having the last laugh.In "Foucault's Pendulum" Umberto Eco is writing a huge joke with the whole world as the punchline. He takes everything you know about history (and quite a few things you don't) and wraps them all up in such a way that they make sense. Or better yet, in a brilliant act of post modernism, he has his characters do it. Causabon, the narrator of the tale, spends his time explaining to the reader that none of this is real. And yet, when you put the book down, all the connections which have been explained become glaringly obvious in real life. It's like when you buy a new car and suddenly all you see on the road is that model. Eco creates the pathways for your own brain to make the connections. I realize this tells you nothing about the plot of the book, but that's half the fun of reading it. You have to decide for yourself where he's being serious and where he's playing a joke. And even after you decide...you're probably wrong.
Like Tim Powers, Eco is very skillful at weaving historical fact into a fantastic tale. Ultimately, you don't know if he's pulling your leg or if he's just written down a long forgotten history and is downplaying it as fiction to make sure he doesn't get into trouble with the powers that be.