Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Foucault's Pendulum
Book Review: Amazing what Eco inspires others to write...
Summary: 4 Stars
I am once again amazed at how intelligent people sound after reading a well written book. I'm not going to spout any big words pretending to be some quasi-literary scholar. Its a good book. Read it. You'll like it.Book Review: Among the more brilliant acts of historical revisionism ever
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
Book Review: An Italian James Fennemore Cooper
Summary: 1 Stars
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.Book Review: An addictive, intelligent rollercoaster ride
Summary: 5 Stars
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)Book Review: An amazingly intelligent author writes a dull book.
Summary: 3 Stars
Eco is a brilliant man who did a tremendous amount of research in order to produce this book. But he tends to drag, sputtering fact after fact. This can get very tiring in a 500+ page book.