Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is a dense, encyclopedic conspiracy novel that arrived in 1988 like a literary inoculation against everything The Da Vinci Code would later popularize. Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi are three editors at a Milanese publishing house specializing in occult manuscripts who decide, half as a joke and half out of intellectual exhaustion, to feed the cranks' material into a computer and synthesize it into a master plot. They call the result the Plan, an alleged six hundred year old Templar scheme to harness telluric currents from beneath the earth to rule the world. The trouble is that real occultists begin to believe the Plan, and one by one they appear in the editors' lives demanding to know the secret. Eco interweaves Kabbalah, Brazilian umbanda rituals, Hermetic philosophy, and the actual Foucault pendulum at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, building a vast, melancholy meditation on how stories take on lives of their own and how meaning can become its own kind of trap.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Foucault's Pendulum
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Three Milan editors, bored with vanity-press occult manuscripts, feed every conspiracy theory in their slush pile into a computer game. The plan they generate is intoxicating. Real believers begin to come for it.
Foucault's Pendulum was written by Umberto Eco and originally published in Italian in 1988. The English translation by William Weaver was released in 1989. It is widely considered Eco's most ambitious novel after The Name of the Rose.
Yes. Foucault's Pendulum is dense with references to occult history, conspiracy theories, semiotics, and Renaissance esotericism. It is much more demanding than The Name of the Rose. Most readers either embrace the rabbit-hole style or set the book aside.
Foucault's Pendulum is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Foucault's Pendulum takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Foucault's Pendulum is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Foucault's Pendulum is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.