Foucault's Pendulum

By Umberto Eco

Two years ago, when I was considerably younger and dumber, I picked up Foucault's Pendulum, read the first 50 pages and then quietly admitted defeat. This is one book that lists approximately 10 things you've never heard of one every single page. Yes. Every page.

Dumb aggie felt largely stupid and gave it up, till the book was flung again in my general direction.

This time around, much thanks to Blackle and Wikipedia, for sorting many things out. For instance, exactly what Foucault's Pendulum, Kabbalah, Pico della Mirandola, the Torah, the Templars, Rosicrucians, alchemy and blah were.

So scary things aside, the book is simply spectacular. It begins with Casaubon, hiding in the Musee des Arts et Meties in Paris waiting for Something Bad to happen. The rest of the story unfolds in a non linear manner ( journal entries, Casaubon's increasingly giddy narratives and Belbo's computer) leading up to why he's secreted away in the museum.

I don't want to give away the major plot elements here, but largely, the book is about The Plan that Casaubon and his colleagues Belbo and Diotavelli make up while editing increasingly crazy manuscripts about all those things I mentioned above.Creepily enough for them, their plan starts coming alive and results in horrific consequences in their lives.

Through the course of the book, everything from pinball, to rural Italy, cults, immortal Counts, wars, Fascists and Caribbean spiritualism fuck around with their (and your) heads. The book is a crazy, amazing read that forces you to look at the world and laugh at all the stupid bastards that populate it. It mocks all the sort of pseudo-intellectual psycho-babble that people make fortunes writing about, while masterfully avoiding the same pitfalls. The braod genre could be a book of conspiracy theories, but Foucault's Pendulum is a lot more than just that.

Must read for anyone who nurtures secret ambitions to assainate Dan Brown with pointy rose shaped shuriken. Ooh, and Eco, apart from being a philosopher, is a professor of Semiotics. Semiotics, people. We dont even know what that means. We are dumb and we need to read more books like this

Rating: 6/5. Its that awesome.

Shut up and read it. Please. I want to have long protracted discussions with someone on the complexities of such amazing writing.