Foucault's Pendulum Paperback – Import, 11 July 2023

The book has a joy ride in disguise. Amazing and complex even today, after the technologies of computers have moved forward 30-40 years

A satirical exposition of people’s desire to believe their own version of the truth. Chock full of allusions and references, and incredibly dense, it certainly is not an easy or light read. The plot and characters are hilarious and the writing extremely clever. Reading this, one might end up feeling mentally inadequate. Would recommend.

One of the best fiction I have read do far. Breath taking movements and while we read we are forced to throw away all our imagination

The binding is not good. It has completely come off.

Book isVery bad condition, please return your book.

Good book.Just wouldn't purchase anything from PBC Distributors. Had a terrible experience.

good quality of the book as well as the packing

Gripping to the very end. ! Eco is a master story teller.

Great read, intertwining several fictional characters in the history of the Templars and Rosecrucians. WOW!

Ich habe Foucault's Pendulum zuerst auf Niederländisch gelesen, wenn es erschienen ist, und kürzlich auf Englisch bestellt. Das Italienisch bin ich nicht genug Herr um es im Original zu lesen. Diese Englische Übersetzung ist aber wesentlich besser als die Niederländische. Wie die deutsche Version ist, Weiß ich nicht.Das Buch ist brillant. Es ist eine Parodie auf das Genre von verschwörungsthriller a la Dan Brown lange bevor das ein Genre war. Es ist sowohl einen Thriller als eine Parodie da drauf.Genial.Die Hauptpersonen denken sich einen Komplott aus um Auflage zu machen in ihr Verlag, glauben letztendlich selber dran und werden sogar Opfer dieses Komplot.Ich halte es für Eco sein bestes Buch, zusammen mit Die geheimnisvolle Flamme der Königin Loana

Amazing journey through history, mysticism, religion and philosophy. Read it once in my teens and done it again almost 40 years later....I certainly see it with different eyes this time...

As initiates into the Orden del Cruz Rosado, Umberto, Dan and I pondered on the best means by which we could draw attention from our Hermandad, and concluded that hiding it in plain sight was our best chance. Hence was born the basis for Foucault's Pendulum, and I must say, Umberto exceeded my wildest hopes in inventing a tale so phantasmagorical only Branch Davidians, UKIP supporters and the pope could possibly believe it (though I'm afraid Dan's limitations meant he could only manage something that some ordinary people actually took seriously).Three guys - erudite Casaubon, neurotic Belbo and mystic Diotallevi - at a dodgy publishing business concoct a fantasy conspiracy around the Templars which ultimately goes bad and comes back to bite them where it hurts. The fantasy is finely constructed, and draws upon texts ancient and modern, some of them in "foreign" so those who don't understand foreign feel there's a bit more depth to the plot.All sorts of stuff gets thrown into the ring, including cabala, Knights of the Round Table, the masons, alchemists and Argonauts, and what party would be complete without the Rosicrucians?People get very bamboozled by numbers, I told him, so numbers are very important, especially those divisible by three, so we get three publishing men, paralleling the holy trinity, the Roman triumvirate, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, and for that matter the Three Stooges, Mary, Mungo and Midge, and Andy Pandy, Loobyloo and Teddy. Making the three up to four is the sinister head of the publishing house, Garamond (a stroke of genius naming him after a typeface); hence the jest midway through about the Gospels themselves being a joke grown out of control becomes a metaphor for the whole, as Garamond brainstorms a moneymaking ruse involving the duping of gullible hermeticists.The Druids, naturally, are at the root of everything. Maybe. Or maybe it's the Grail. Then again it could be the suave Agliè, channelling some superannuated or possibly immortal Comte. But then again it could be the Zionists, although there's the possibility that "their" Protocols were misattributed, with "Ismail" being transposed with "Israel". It's history as spelling error. Cock up, not conspiracy. Where's the spellchecker when you need to avert the apocalypse?Umberto has used all sorts of devices to get the story over, including files found on a computer, but mostly he uses the kinds of implausible, contrived conversations found in 1920s satirical novels-of-ideas such as those by Aldous Huxley. And funny? It's so funny that the humour appears to have gone right over some people's heads.Perhaps the funniest moment is when Casaubon's wife Lia points out that the document that triggered the whole fantasy is nothing more sinister than a faded medieval shopping list, and proceeds to prove it in a manner matching any of Casaubon's own "proofs".But the best episode comes in chapter 73, with Belbo's derivative noodlings on his computer having a dream-like quality similar to the Hades section of Ulysses, whose author is joined in a kind of Eng Lit medley which references Finnegan's Wake (Joyce's everyman, Here Comes Everybody), The Waste Land (Madame Sosostris) and the Shakespeare authorship non-controversy, attributing the bard's work to Bacon ("Bacon was a pig," he quips).I'm sure some of the other chapters are as allusion-heavy as this one - Umberto always had his nose stuck in some book or another, some of them wholly imaginary judging by some of the epigrams heading each chapter - but this chapter plays nicely to my particular speciality, as he probably knows.At the end, I told Umberto, there should be a convoluted denouement, featuring lots of faux-foreign incantations, blokes in dodgy cloaks (he himself wanted a Star Wars angle) and a girl on roofies. Think Apocalypse Now! but without decapitated farm animals... Boy, did he go OTT on that one! I mean, I've read some well-past-credible conspiracy theories before - Kennedy, Area 61, Opus Dei (hmm, on second thoughts that's one of Dan's more credible ones) - but the contrivances he injected at the end here blow all my suggestions away.So all I can say is, "Well done, Umberto old mate. You exceeded all my expectations."

"...if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all.""Foucault's Pendulum" is a book rich in history and deep in mystery. Even when you reach the end, you may not be entirely sure what just happened. And of course, considering the subject matter, that is entirely the point.The story centers around one Casaubon, a student writing a paper about the Knights Templar. By chance, he meets Jacopo Belbo, a book editor working for a small publisher in Milan. They strike up a fast friendship, and Casaubon shortly begins working for the same publisher, helping them to gather facts and imagery for a new series of books they are publishing.Casaubon, Belbo, and another editor named Diotallevi take a morbid interest in the subject matter of the many books that are brought to them. The prospective authors, who they call "the Diabolicals," present them with far-fetched ideas about global historical conspiracies and a centuries-old plot to somehow rule the world from the shadows. While each story is different, the three men can see common threads running through all of them, and on their own time they explore the idea further themselves, just for the fun of it.Using an early model of a word processor (celverly named Abulafia, after the Hebrew Kabbalah scholar), they begin borrowing random concepts from the work of the Diabolicals and stringing them together. They include other sources as well, just to mix it up a bit. What they discover is what they call the Plan, and it could be the most important conspiracy theory in the history of the modern world, involving the Rosicrucians, the Jewish Kabbalah, Masonic rituals, Napoleon, the Nazis, and of course at the center of it all, the Knights Templar, spanning over 600 years of European history... or, it could just be a huge coincidence.What makes "Foucault's Pendulum" such a great novel is not just how it strings the different pieces of the puzzle together (which it does masterfully), nor simply how it makes it whole idea so compelling (which it also does well), but how, simulataneously, it makes you question everything you're reading. Right up until the end (and even beyond), Eco keeps you guessing as to what is "real" and what is not. Where other authors, covering similar subjects, make the conclusions predictable or melodramatic, Eco manages to find a place where the reader is never really sure if what they're reading about is fact, fiction, or something in between. The conclusion is subtle, and leaves nagging doubts in the reader's mind.The history presented in the book is top-notch, and it's never presented in a way that is insulting or "dumbed down" for the reader. Many books like this tend to include long, painfully obvious passages of exposition, but with Eco one never feels like the information is being presented by sacrificing the story. He manages exposition quite well, and everything that is presented matches the needed context of story and the characters.The characters themselves have depth, and their dialogue never fails to make them real for the reader. I particularly enjoyed one part, early on, when the three new friends discuss a School of Comparative Irrelevance, a course of studies for useless or impossible subjects, such as "Urban Planning for Gypsies," "Morse Syntax," and "The Phonetics of the Silent Film." This passage served many purposes. On the surface level, it was extremely amusing. It also told the reader a great deal about each of the main characters in an efficient, transparent way. Finally, it serves as foreshadowing of the far broader and deeper invention these characters would soon be embarking upon. To accomplish so much in just a few pages of (primarily) dialogue is the mark of a gifted author.Through the course of the book Casaubon has many different experiences, both mystical and mundane. Abulafia becomes more than a simple word processor, it becomes a source of truth and another veil of mystery to be pulled aside. Belbo tries to reconcile his sardonic nature with the mystery they seem to be uncovering, trying to maintain a scholarly distance while becoming more and more entranced with the story beneath the stories they hear. And Diotallevi ties everything they learn in with his own beliefs, and what truth means to him.In the end, "Foucault's Pendulum" is a story about faith, and both the wonderful and terrible things a powerful belief can accomplish. It is also about how different people can take the same facts and each will interpret them in their own way, often wildly different from one another. Eco conveys his ideas via a compelling, original story, and in so doing makes we, the readers, think about what he has to say. It is not the facts themselves that are important, but only the connections we make between them. Perhaps, in the end, it is the interpretations, not the facts themselves, which shape beliefs... and therefore shape the events of history."But I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."