Umberto Eco. Foucault’s Pendulum. (1989) It took me about a month to read this book. Not a page-turner, but it drew me in, and I kept returning to it. A rich mess of reality, conspiracy theories, human gullibility, back stories, esoteric lore, epigrammatic observations on anything relevant to narrative moment, paranormal (or maybe not) events, computer science, code breaking, the mysterious history of the Templars – all this and more just kept me reading. And of course Foucault's Pendulum, swinging through its arc every 16.5 seconds.
The central conceit is that three editors, who work for a publishing house, decide to invent a new version of the Templar story, which has occupied too much of the attention of the hapless authors who are seduced into paying to publish their discoveries of the secret of the Templars, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, and the other secret societies believed to run the machinery that we are pleased to call real life.
A rich and satisfying book. Read it. ****
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