I finished reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco a while back, but I’m torn about my review.
The book is basically a thinking man’s The Da Vinci Code, but it came out in the 1980s. It follows a group of three editors (well, two editors and one philologist who fancies himself ‘a kind of private eye of learning’; this is the narrator) who cook up an explanation for all the world’s secrets and conspiracies. They do this as a joke, until the joke takes on a life of its own.
It’s fascinating to read Eco because of his intelligence and raw knowledge. The book gets a little slow at some points because of all the obscure history he has to relate, but it’s a good story with good characters. If you like reading about secret societies, this is your book.
“Thinking man’s ‘Da Vinci Code’?” I’m a-gonna come and-a mess up a-you face!
Really, though, after reading Le Code, I can see how you’d make that association. It’s dense, and wraps itself in layers of hermetic and tangential meaning. And both books (though Eco’s to better effect) have a central core which explores created meaning, and the need for that meaning to be in turn invested with belief by people.
However, Eco explores an intellectual and metaphysical plain which Dan Brown doesn’t even get near, much less touch. If you don’t believe me, check out “The Island of the Day Before,” a brilliant book with a narrator stranded on a ship in a bay by himself. Easily the most entertaining stuck-by-yourself-on-a-deserted-ship feel-good book of 2005!
And seriously, Umberto Eco will mess you up.
Well, it’s not like I enjoyed ‘Le Code’: see these posts.
I see your point, though. I dashed off this review because, as I said, I am conflicted. I will say this, I liked it well enough to snatch up copies of ‘The Island of the Day Before’ and ‘Baudolino’ at a recent library sale. I also bought ‘The Name of the Rose’ at my local independent bookstore.