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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The shaggiest shaggy dog story of all., 17 Jun 2006
This is not an easy read, indeed the first forty pages or so make some of the most intense demands on the reader of any book I have ever read, but if you have a love of the mysterious, the obscure and the sinister it is well worth persisting with. The way the story unfolds is quite ingenious and you will, if nothing else, learn a huge amount of obscure history along the way.
The basic premise of the plot is actually quite simple: three editors in a Milan publishing house specializing in wildly whacky works on the mystical and the occult begin, for their own amusement, to make speculative connections between the various way-out theories put forward in the manuscripts submitted for publication. To their amazement it soon transpires that they might be on to something, something so important that their own lives are suddenly put at risk.
Eco clearly had great fun with this, throwing every crack-pot theory and esoteric religious belief into the mix. The Templars are there, of course, as are the Rosicrucians, the darker branches of the Catholic church and the Masons. The Hollow Earth theory is given a spin, Khabbala is discussed, Dr Dee puts in an appearance and the measurements of the great pyramids in Egypt provide the answers to nearly everything. It is all beautifully explained, so outlandishly implausible that maybe, just maybe, it has to be true......
For a novel which is primarily about obscure branches of knowledge and the play of ideas the characters are actually surprisingly well drawn: Casaubon, the narrator of the story wondering just what it is they have stumbled upon; Belbo with his melancholy sense of the colourful road not travelled; Diotallevi, mild and knowledgeable, getting slightly drunk on mineral water, and the mysterious Aglie, who appears to have all the answers. Or, perhaps, all the answers bar one...
If you're looking for something imaginative and challenging, something which could perhaps be described as the Da Vinci Code's immeasurably smarter brother, then this could be for you. Demanding, but well worth the effort.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant and in a genre of its own, 14 Dec 2004
In a day were the "The Da Vinci Code" is the bed time book of scores of families -- and other books are riding the popularity of it -- "Foucaults' Pendulum" remains the undisputed and unmatched book on "conspiration theories" and alternative christian interpretation. It's interesting that a work plainly marked as fiction and that doesn't pose for anything else is more well researched and backed than books that try to sell an "authoritary" look. This book, while not without some small shortcomings, is adictive and extremely compelling. The Templars, the Priory, Christ, R+C, the Cathars, the FM, the Grail, all this and much, much more is connected in a game-like manner by the main characters in the book. The dialogues are witty and the characters well-developed. It's harder to read than other books of the genre, but in a way "Foucault's Pendulum" is in it's own genre... the sheer ammount of information presented, the use of several languages, the use of unheard of symbols and facts, all combines to make the book a bit dense but very rewarding. Eco, at the same time he exposes the leaps of faith and logic that some theories make in the way of reaching a suitable conclusion, shows the joy and motivation in the process of contructing alternative theories and even fleshes out some extremely interesting historic connections.
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eco rewrites history for kicks..., 12 Jun 2001
By A Customer
'Foucault's Pendulum' takes a brave step. With 'The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail' in mind Eco writes of three Italian publishers, bored with the daily grind, who decide to play a game with history, seeing through a glass darkly and rewriting the record books in such a way as to incorporate the myriad of occultist belief and arcana their authors' produce. Beginning around the Crusades and the formation of the Knights Templar the men race through a new explanation of historical events towards the present day, 'outing' a conspiracy theorist's dream target in the process. The skill of the novel lies in Eco's masterly account of how the protagonists gradually become caught in their lie, beginning to see more and more 'truth' behind their own fiction. What is more (and at this point, perhaps, I should mention that I do not necessarily count myself a stupid man), the author manages to set things so firmly in the reader's mind, and the publishers make so convincing a case, that the reader is left pondering, somewhere in the back of a usually cynical perception, 'Well, what if...' Eco is a man who proved in 'The Name of the Rose' that he knows everything about everything - or at least as close to it as a man is likely to get - and his writing presents it to us in masterly, tight narration. The novel is filled with swathes of bizarre facts by which he builds out his fiction and yet he never once becomes boring. This is the man who previously talked for pages on the minutae of 13th Century Papal politics, remember, and made it more like a thriller than most pulp fictionists could dream of. Read him and expand whichever horizons you have.
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