Foucault's Pendulum

Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco

Foucault's Pendulum
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Book Summary Information

Author: Umberto Eco
Reader: Tim Curry
Edition: Audio Cassette
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
Published: 1995-10-15
ISBN: 1559273593
Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Book Reviews of Foucault's Pendulum

Book Review: too much, too much, too much...
Summary: 3 Stars

After reading The Name of the Rose and enjoying it quite a bit, I was interested to try Foucault's Pendulum which is a classic work in its own right. However, I found the book very hard to follow for the first half because of the constant discussions between the main characters about all the Occult esoterica and mainstream theology they learned over their careers as if they're competing with each other on who knows the most arcane detail. Their discussions, planning, scheming and research just seemed so grandiose, so overwhelmingly demonstrative that the long esoteric debates muted away the rest of the story to develop in the background so the ending seems abrupt and evokes little reaction from the reader. When it came, my reaction was "oh well, there's the end." Perhaps I missed something in this book...

Summary of Foucault's Pendulum

One Colonel Ardenti, who has unnaturally black, brilliantined hair, a carefully-groomed mustache, wears maroon socks, and who once served in the Foreign Legion, starts it all. He tells three Milan book editors that he has discovered a coded message about a Templar Plan, centuries old and involving Stonehenge -- a plan to tap a mystic source of power far greater than atomic energy.

The editors, who have spent altogether too much time rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult by fanatics and dilettantes, decide to have a little fun. They'll create a Plan of their own. But how?

Randomly they throw together manuscript pages on hermetic thought; The Masters of the World, who live beneath the earth, The Comte de Sain-Germain, who lives forever. They add Satanic initiation rites of the Knights of the Temple, Assassins, Rosicrucians, Brazilian voodoo, the Third Reich. And they feed all this, and much more, into their powerful computer, Abulafia.

A terrific joke, they think, until the Plan assumes and life and power of its own, and turns deadly -- as people mysteriously begin to disappear, one by one, starting with Colonel Ardenti.

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