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Il pendolo di Foucault

By Umberto Eco

(5608)

| Hardcover | No ISBN

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Il pendolo di Foucault

23 giugno - vigilia di san Giovanni - Parigi, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. L'orario di chiusura al pubblico è appena passato, e un uomo aspetta, nascosto in una saletta. E intanto i ricordi gli affollano la mente. Ricordi di due giorni prima, q ... (read full critics)

mangialibri published on Fri, 17 Feb 2012

Il pendolo di Foucault

La scheda e le recensioni di Il Pendolo di Foucault di Umberto Eco, edito da Bompiani. Anni '70. Casaubon, Diotallevi e Belbo lavorano in una piccola casa editrice milanese, che inizia a specializzarsi in pubblicazioni esoteriche. E così un po' per l ... (read full critics)

Qlibri published on Tue, 30 Nov 2010

6 Reviews

1 person find this helpful

The best of Eco

There is a conspiracy everywhere... who is looking, spying, reading? It keeps you in after the first chapter, and if you do not understand much, no problem, neither do the protagonists...

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Vanhowson said on Jun 1, 2010 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Semplicemente stupendo!

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ClaudioSky said on Feb 4, 2008 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Abulafia: come ricostruire la Storia con la combinazione casuale dei dati

Se pensate che Il Codice da Vinci sia la più grande rivelazione del secolo, leggete IL Pendolo di Foucaul: scoprirete che chiunque può inventare rivelazioni, chiunque può creare collegamenti tra gli eventi storici e ricreare le trame di un Piano Diabolico. E se lo leggete, vi renderete conto che è m ... (continue)

Se pensate che Il Codice da Vinci sia la più grande rivelazione del secolo, leggete IL Pendolo di Foucaul: scoprirete che chiunque può inventare rivelazioni, chiunque può creare collegamenti tra gli eventi storici e ricreare le trame di un Piano Diabolico. E se lo leggete, vi renderete conto che è molto facile cadere nella trappola dei Piani (veri o fasulli), e che questo può essere pericoloso.
Lo imparano a loro spese i 3 protagonisti di questo romanzo (che cos'è? Thriller, storico, saggio-storico-thriller?): Casaubon (la voce narrante), Belbo (il più interessante) e Diotallevi. Tre persone completamente diverse che si riuniranno per beffare la Storia e ricostruire un Piano fasullo, in un gioco di Creazione divina inizialmente scanzonato, poi sempre più impegnativo e pericoloso, tanto che qualcuno ci crede veramente, e finisce male.
L'idea parte dall'ossessione per i Templari e i Rosa-Croce di Casaubon, dalla passione per la numerologia e la Torah di Diotallevi (sarà un caso che l'unico vero credente tra i tre abbia la parola Dio nel cognome?)... E Belbo? Belbo è il carismatico (nonostante in realtà non prenda mai una decisione, la sua vita è caratterizzata dalle non-scelte e dall'inerzia), colui che mette insieme gli altri due amici, quello che più si fa trascinare dall'idea di un Piano, perchè solo in quello egli è riuscito a scegliere e ad agire, e se anche fallisse, dopotutto è lui che ha creato tutto, non sarebbe una grande perdita.
Il romanzo va letto più che altro come un saggio-d'inchiesta (finto): ci sono tantissime nozioni storiche, tantissimi collegamenti tra i vari gruppi segreti e massonici, ma la cosa in assoluto più interessante è che Eco vuole dirci "Cretini" Piantatela di credere ai Templari come cavalieri della Maddalena, ai Maya come portatori del segreto della fine del mondo e a tutte le altre idiozie che possiamo trovare in un programma tipo Voyager. Sono tutte invenzioni dell'Uomo: fatelo anche voi, prendete due frasi a caso e cercate di ricavarne un messaggio comune. Vedrete che funziona. Tutti i misteri irrisolti, tutta la Storia potrebbe essere una grande bufala".
Almeno, questo è quello che provavo io nella lettura. Grazie anche alla saggezza di Lia, il personaggio più positivo e razionale di tutta la storia.
Non è Il nome della rosa, che è insuperabile, però è una lettura stimolante (Eco stimola a pensare, non ad adagiarsi sugli allori), che apre gli occhi sui tranelli della Storia: perchè, dopotutto, la Storia è forse una combinazione casuale di dati messi insieme da chi vuole trovare un Perché a tutti gli orrori e gli errori degli uomini.

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RobyGranger said on May 26, 2012 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Dire che non mi è piaciuto è dire poco. Per me è un libro che va contro ogni norma comunicativa: lo scopo dell'autore non riesco a credere che fosse quello di dire qualcosa al lettore. Non è plausibile. C'è una diga tra l'autore e il lettore. Non mi vergogno di dire che ci sono state intere pagine i ... (continue)

Dire che non mi è piaciuto è dire poco. Per me è un libro che va contro ogni norma comunicativa: lo scopo dell'autore non riesco a credere che fosse quello di dire qualcosa al lettore. Non è plausibile. C'è una diga tra l'autore e il lettore. Non mi vergogno di dire che ci sono state intere pagine in cui non sono riuscito a decifrare la maggior parte delle parole, non riuscivo a trovarle nemmeno sul vocabolario. Non credo leggerò altri libri di Eco.

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Hillel81 said on May 25, 2012 | 2 feedbacks

-Lovi-

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Sempiomust said on Oct 11, 2010 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

Foucault's pendulum and me

Well I first read Foucault's pendulum when I was 14 or 15 and at the time I really liked the story and the fact that it was a page-turner. I wanted to know how it ended. Then I re-read it many times, probably around 15-20, and I appreciated the amount of notions you get to learn from it. It relates ... (continue)

Well I first read Foucault's pendulum when I was 14 or 15 and at the time I really liked the story and the fact that it was a page-turner. I wanted to know how it ended. Then I re-read it many times, probably around 15-20, and I appreciated the amount of notions you get to learn from it. It relates about an alchemical view of history that was only popularized (in a bad way) by Dan Brown very recently, but that in 1988 was rather new. When I was at Imperial College I spent many happy afternoons at the top floor of the Science Museum Library building (which is part of the Imperial College Library) where I found a lot of the books that gave rise to the epigraphs introducing each chapter. I read some of these books and remarked how uninspiring, boring, dull and idiotic they were; and I told myself that only a genius writer could turn all that crap into a story that was so pleasant to read and whose roots were all based on published literature. Eco never invents much; he wrote a critique to Dan Brown's book where he says that the idea of Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene was a recursive theme in medieval and renaissance alchemical/theological philosophy; he just nicked it and put it in his book, but in such a way that it was credible. Dan Brown gave up credibility, and just nicked it full stop. In a way, I like Foucault's pendulum because the things it says are all documented; it is a veritable bibliography. This is very different from Dan Brown and the legion of other writers that followed.
One other thing I liked about it is much more personal. It relates about Milan in a way that makes this city sound alive, interesting, like a cultural beehive. When I was 14, this is how I dreamt I would live Milan as an adult. University politics, enlightened friends with whom you could debate all night long about a fantastic academy where courses names were oxymora de re and de facto. Things like ``avunculogratular mechanics" being the art of building machines to say hi to your aunt had me rolling on the floor laughing for hours. Same goes for ``tetrapiloctomy", the art of splitting hairs (in four, as the Italian version of the saying goes). This was not invented by Eco alone. He was part of a cultural elite group called the ``'63 group", where he and some of his contemporaries experimented with words and concepts. I wanted to have friends like that when I grew up. Jacopo Belbo and Casaubon meet one day at a left-wing demonstration that turns nasty because some fascists from Piazza San Babila start some riots. A shot is heard in Via Laghetto, and the demonstration disbands in an unorderly way. Belbo and Casaubon run away and stop in Piazza del Duomo, where they start feeding the pigeons to melt in the crowd, under a bright sun and a dry wind, one of those clear days when even Milan appears beautiful. I crossed Piazza San Babila every day to go to the Conservatoire. A friend of mine lived close Via Laghetto, and I skateboarded in Piazza del Duomo. I not only knew those places, I lived in them daily. It was too intriguing to think that a millenia-old mystery had scattered its hints all around Europe, and that the people who investigated them were --- fictionally --- right there under my nose. When my father went to London and took us all with him, I was against this. I was just starting to make close friends, and I was plunged in a hostile environment that provided me with 2 years of pure hell. Of course I am now very glad of how things turned out for me, but at the time I could only cry over my lost love for Milan as it was just flourishing. When I finally went back to Milan in 2003, thirteen years later, I found virtually nothing of what I'd left. I never really found the time to go see Milan under a bright sun and a dry wind. I never again sat in the safe, covered Galleria Vittorio Emanuele a summer storm was raging all around. My skateboard is still with me but I never used it again in Milan (I used it a couple of times in Paris). No cultural debate with enlightened friends ensued, as everyone was frantically trying to make ends meet in today's ``temporary and badly paid work to youth" setting. I saw my old friends even more rarely than when I lived in London, paradoxically. At least when I was in London, when a friend came to see me, we spent a few days together. In Milan, the Urgent never left time to deal with the Important. Even University life in Milan was rather awful. Now I don't want to go into details here, suffice it to say that --- from a crooked point of view --- the bad experience ad Politecnico di Milano was beneficial because it finally told me that ``my" Milan only existed in my mind; I then felt free to pursue my career elsewhere, and now I would not go back to Milan for the world.
The final thing I like about the book is Casaubon's job. Chasing up old philological trails, historical information, a cultural detective so to speak, would have been my next best thing after mathematics. Back when I chose maths, in 1992, I actually thought about reading philology for a minute. Casaubon hunts for information halfway through Europe, and I followed him with envy every time I read the book, as he hid himself in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM) in Paris for the conclusive scene. This inspired me to take up a BSc thesis in history of mathematics, about an Italian physicist called Fabrizio Mossotti, that forced me to go read up old manuscripts and letters from the 1800s all over Europe: London, Milan, Vienna... (you can read about this in http://liberti.dhs.org/liberti/maths-history/mossotti/m… if you're interested) I felt a bit like Casaubon and was extremely proud of myself and very happy. Mossotti was involved in some secret societies, and I hunted their trails much like Casaubon. I must say that my search did not yield the conclusive piece of evidence I was after, to my dismay. But such is the difference between reality and fiction. You might be aware that the CNAM hosts both a museum and a university, and I had applied to an assistant professorship at the CNAM university last year. I did not make it, but during the interview I could not refrain from declaring that one of my strong motivation to apply there was Eco's Foucault's pendulum. The commission burst out laughing, and maybe that's why I wasn't offered the position. But I wouldn't have been able NOT to say that! I was even re-reading the book (in French) at the time, and really just by chance I had brought it with me to the interview, making myself look more like a head case than is really true.

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Leo said on Jul 14, 2007 | Add your feedback