Blog this item

Il Pendolo di Foucault

By Umberto Eco

(5613)

| Hardcover | No ISBN

Like Il Pendolo di Foucault?
Join aNobii to see if your friends read it, and discover similar books!

5 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...

Is this helpful?

Vanhowson said on Jun 1, 2010 | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

Semplicemente stupendo!

Is this helpful?

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

io ci ho messo tutto l impegno per leggere questo libro , ma Eco sfida proprio la pazienza del lettore .. la prima parte sui templari e' interessantissima e pensavo che la vicenda fosse incentrata su questi ,, ma poi passa al nulla , si perde , non ha storia , ma solo nozioni culturali esoteriche .. ... (continue)

io ci ho messo tutto l impegno per leggere questo libro , ma Eco sfida proprio la pazienza del lettore .. la prima parte sui templari e' interessantissima e pensavo che la vicenda fosse incentrata su questi ,, ma poi passa al nulla , si perde , non ha storia , ma solo nozioni culturali esoteriche .. mi spiace ma Eco in questo caso poteva rispiarmerselo questo libro , e' stato veramente superbo nel credere che il lettore lo seguisse sulla fiducia . Eco e' un grande ma si deve mettere nei panni del lettore , qui se ne e' dimenticato !

Is this helpful?

meryoc said on May 29, 2012 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

-Lovi-

Is this helpful?

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.

Is this helpful?

Leo said on Jul 14, 2007 | Add your feedback