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Umberto Eco

Foucault's Pendulum Paperback – Illustrated, March 5, 2007

by Umberto Eco (Author), William Weaver (Translator)

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International bestselling and award-winning author Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is "an intellectual adventure story, as sensational, thrilling, and packed with arcana as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Count of Monte Cristo" (The Washington Post Book World).

Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled — a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth.

Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.

"An encyclopedic detective story . . . An intellectual triumph." —Anthony Burgess

"Endlessly diverting . . . Even more intricate and absorbing than his international bestseller The Name of the Rose."—Time

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640 pages
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English
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Mariner Books
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March 5, 2007
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5.31 x 1.14 x 8 inches
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9780156032971
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978-0156032971
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But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Highlighted by 476 Kindle readers
You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.
Highlighted by 370 Kindle readers
Counterfactual conditionals are always true, because the premise is false.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“As brilliant and quirky as The Name of the Rose, as mischievous and wide-ranging . . . A virtuoso performance.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“An encyclopedic detective story about a search for the center of an ancient, still-living conspiracy of men who seek not merely power over the earth but the power of the earth itself . . . An intellectual triumph.” — New York Times Book Review

“Reads as if it were written by the most popular lecturer on campus with the instincts of a Catskill Mountains tumbler who keeps the one-liners coming . . . On almost every page, Eco comes up with some fresh notion or turn of phrase that displays his original mind. . . . Once the reader gets on the Eco carousel it's hard to get off.” — New York Times

“Over the course of the book, we encounter medieval history, mysticism, Gnosticism, cabalism, time charts and numerology, pagan rituals, World War II nostalgia, Brazilian macumba religion, satires of contemporary Italian leftism and intellectual life, jabs at publishing practices, a computer named Abulafia, and . . . nods toward Sam Spade and other pop-culture icons. . . . Eco chooses the path less chosen by intellectual novelists—common sense. And that has made all the difference.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“Foucault's Pendulum is Eco's magical mystery tour of the Western mind. . . . With this book, Eco puts himself in the grand and acerbic tradition of Petronius, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire.” — Chicago Tribune

“Rich and witty.” — Newsweek

“A salubrious feast of words and ideas . . . A seriocomic interpretation of the modern mind. Like Erasmus and Swift, Eco plays the fool to teach us better about ourselves.” — Christian Science Monitor

From the Inside Flap

"As brilliant and quirky as THE NAME OF THE ROSE, as mischievous and wide-raning....A virtuoso performance."
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Three clever book editors, inspired by an extraordinary fable they heard years befoe, decide to have a little fun. Randomly feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all their entires, they think they are creating a long lazy game--until the game starts taking over....
Here is an incredible journey of thought and history, memory and fantasy, a tour de force as enthralling as anything Umberto Eco--or indeed anyone--has ever devised.

"From the Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

“As brilliant and quirky as The Name of the Rose, as mischievous and wide-ranging . . . A virtuoso performance.” —San Francisco Chronicle

A literary joke plunges its creators into mortal danger in this captivating intellectual thriller by celebrated author Umberto Eco.

A Colonel Ardenti starts it all: He tells three editors that he has discovered a coded message about a centuries-old Knights Templar plan to tap a mystic source of power greater than atomic energy. The editors, bored with rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult and amused by his fantastic claims, decide to cook up a Plan of their own. Into their computer they feed manuscript pages on Satanic initiation rites, Rosicrucianism, the measurements of the Great Pyramid—and out comes a map indicating a point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled, a point located at Foucault’s Pendulum in Paris. A terrific joke, they think. Until people begin to disappear mysteriously, starting with the colonel . . .
“An encyclopedic detective story about a search for the center of an ancient, still-living conspiracy of men who seek not merely power over the earth but the power of the earth itself . . . An intellectual triumph.” —Anthony Burgess, The New York Times Book Review

UMBERTO ECO is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the bestselling author of numerous novels and essays. He lives in Milan.

About the Author

UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and seven novels, including The Name of the Rose,The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega, was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

HEBREW HANDWRITING ART

That was when I saw the Pendulum.
The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.
I knew—but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing—that the period was governed by the square root of the length of the wire and by p, that number which, however irrational to sublunar minds, through a higher rationality binds the circumference and diameter of all possible circles. The time it took the sphere to swing from end to end was determined by an arcane conspiracy between the most timeless of measures: the singularity of the point of suspension, the duality of the plane’s dimensions, the triadic beginning of p, the secret quadratic nature of the root, and the unnumbered perfection of the circle itself.
I also knew that a magnetic device centered in the floor beneath issued its command to a cylinder hidden in the heart of the sphere, thus assuring continual motion. This device, far from interfering with the law of the Pendulum, in fact permitted its manifestation, for in a vacuum any object hanging from a weightless and unstretchable wire free of air resistance and friction will oscillate for eternity.

The copper sphere gave off pale, shifting glints as it was struck by the last rays of the sun that came through the great stained-glass windows. Were its tip to graze, as it had in the past, a layer of damp sand spread on the floor of the choir, each swing would make a light furrow, and the furrows, changing direction imperceptibly, would widen to form a breach, a groove with radial symmetry—like the outline of a mandala or pentaculum, a star, a mystic rose. No, more a tale recorded on an expanse of desert, in tracks left by countless caravans of nomads, a story of slow, millennial migrations, like those of the people of Atlantis when they left the continent of Mu and roamed, stubbornly, compactly, from Tasmania to Greenland, from Capricorn to Cancer, from Prince Edward Island to the Svalbards. The tip retraced, narrated anew in compressed time what they had done between one ice age and another, and perhaps were doing still, those couriers of the Masters. Perhaps the tip grazed Agarttha, the center of the world, as it journeyed from Samoa to Novaya Zemlya. And I sensed that a single pattern united Avalon, beyond the north wind, to the southern desert where lies the enigma of Ayers Rock.

At that moment of four in the afternoon of June 23, the Pendulum was slowing at one end of its swing, then falling back lazily toward the center, regaining speed along the way, slashing confidently through the hidden parallelogram of forces that were its destiny.

Had I remained there despite the passage of the hours, to stare at that bird’s head, that spear’s tip, that obverse helmet, as it traced its diagonals in the void, grazing the opposing points of its astigmatic circumference, I would have fallen victim to an illusion: that the Pendulum’s plane of oscillation had gone full circle, had returned to its starting point in thirty-two hours, describing an ellipse that rotated around its center at a speed proportional to the sine of its latitude. What would its rotation have been had it hung instead from the dome of Solomon’s Temple? Perhaps the Knights had tried it there, too. Perhaps the solution, the final meaning, would have been no different. Perhaps the abbey church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs was the true Temple. In any case, the experiment would work perfectly only at the Pole, the one place where the Pendulum, on the earth’s extended axis, would complete its cycle in twenty-four hours.
But this deviation from the Law, which the Law took into account, this violation of the rule did not make the marvel any less marvelous. I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving.
So it was not so much the earth to which I addressed my gaze but the heavens, where the mystery of absolute immobility was celebrated. The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved—earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic expansion—one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move. And I was now taking part in that supreme experience. I, too, moved with the all, but I could see the One, the Rock, the Guarantee, the luminous mist that is not body, that has no shape, weight, quantity, or quality, that does not see or hear, that cannot be sensed, that is in no place, in no time, and is not soul, intelligence, imagination, opinion, number, order, or measure. Neither darkness nor light, neither error nor truth.

I was roused by a listless exchange between a boy who wore glasses and a girl who unfortunately did not.
“It’s Foucault’s Pendulum,” he was saying. “First tried out in a cellar in 1851, then shown at the Observatoire, and later under the dome of the Panthéon with a wire sixty-seven meters long and a sphere weighing twenty-eight kilos. Since 1855 it’s been here, in a smaller version, hanging from that hole in the middle of the rib.”
“What does it do? Just hang there?”
“It proves the rotation of the earth. Since the point of suspension doesn’t move . . .”
“Why doesn’t it move?”
“Well, because a point . . . the central point, I mean, the one right in the middle of all the points you see . . . it’s a geometric point; you can’t see it because it has no dimension, and if something has no dimension, it can’t move, not right or left, not up or down. So it doesn’t rotate with the earth. You understand? It can’t even rotate around itself. There is no ‘itself.’”
“But the earth turns.”
“The earth turns, but the point doesn’t. That’s how it is. Just take my word for it.”
“I guess it’s the Pendulum’s business.”
Idiot. Above her head was the only stable place in the cosmos, the only refuge from the damnation of the panta rei, and she guessed it was the Pendulum’s business, not hers. A moment later the couple went off—he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she, inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite, both oblivious of the awesomeness of their encounter—their first and last encounter—with the One, the Ein-Sof, the Ineffable. How could you fail to kneel down before this altar of certitude?
I watched with reverence and fear. In that instant I was convinced that Jacopo Belbo was right. What he told me about the Pendulum Ihad attributed to esthetic raving, to the shapeless cancer taking gradual shape in his soul, transforming the game into reality without his realizing it. But if he was right about the Pendulum, perhaps all the rest was true as well: the Plan, the Universal Plot. And in that case I had been right to come here, on the eve of the summer solstice. Jacopo Belbo was not crazy; he had simply, through his game, hit upon the truth.
But the fact is that it doesn’t take long for the experience of the Numinous to unhinge the mind.
I tried then to shift my gaze. I followed the curve that rose from the capitals of the semicircle of columns and ran along the ribs of the vault toward the key, mirroring the mystery of the ogive, that supreme static hypocrisy which rests on an absence, making the columns believe that they are thrusting the great ribs upward and the ribs believe that they are holding the columns down, the vault being both all and nothing, at once cause and effect. But I realized that to neglect the Pendulum that hung from the vault while admiring the vault itself was like becoming drunk at the stream instead of drinking at the source.
The choir of Saint-Martin-des-Champs existed only so that, by virtue of the Law, the Pendulum could exist; and the Pendulum existed so that the choir could exist. You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

Still unable to take my eyes from the key of the vault, I retreated, step by step, for I had learned the path by heart in the few minutes I had been there. Great metal tortoises filed past me on either side, imposing enough to signal their presence at the corner of my eyes. I fell back along the nave toward the front entrance, and again those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks: the planes of Bréguet, Blériot, Esnault, and the helicopter of Dufaux.
A signed first edition of this book has been privately printed by The Franklin Library.

Copyright © 1988 Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani
Sonzogno Etas S.p.A., Milano.
English translation copyright © 1989 by Harcourt, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/ contact or mailed
to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 015603297X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; First edition (March 5, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780156032971
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156032971
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.14 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #136,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,526 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #2,029 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #9,083 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian novelist, medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic.

He is the author of several bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.

He has also written academic texts and children's books.

Photography (c) Università Reggio Calabria

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Rich Stoehr

Interpreting the language of connections

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 22, 2004

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"...if there had to be a cosmic plot, we could invent the most cosmic of all."
"Foucault's Pendulum" is a book rich in history and deep in mystery. Even when you reach the end, you may not be entirely sure what just happened. And of course, considering the subject matter, that is entirely the point.
The story centers around one Casaubon, a student writing a paper about the Knights Templar. By chance, he meets Jacopo Belbo, a book editor working for a small publisher in Milan. They strike up a fast friendship, and Casaubon shortly begins working for the same publisher, helping them to gather facts and imagery for a new series of books they are publishing.
Casaubon, Belbo, and another editor named Diotallevi take a morbid interest in the subject matter of the many books that are brought to them. The prospective authors, who they call "the Diabolicals," present them with far-fetched ideas about global historical conspiracies and a centuries-old plot to somehow rule the world from the shadows. While each story is different, the three men can see common threads running through all of them, and on their own time they explore the idea further themselves, just for the fun of it.
Using an early model of a word processor (celverly named Abulafia, after the Hebrew Kabbalah scholar), they begin borrowing random concepts from the work of the Diabolicals and stringing them together. They include other sources as well, just to mix it up a bit. What they discover is what they call the Plan, and it could be the most important conspiracy theory in the history of the modern world, involving the Rosicrucians, the Jewish Kabbalah, Masonic rituals, Napoleon, the Nazis, and of course at the center of it all, the Knights Templar, spanning over 600 years of European history... or, it could just be a huge coincidence.
What makes "Foucault's Pendulum" such a great novel is not just how it strings the different pieces of the puzzle together (which it does masterfully), nor simply how it makes it whole idea so compelling (which it also does well), but how, simulataneously, it makes you question everything you're reading. Right up until the end (and even beyond), Eco keeps you guessing as to what is "real" and what is not. Where other authors, covering similar subjects, make the conclusions predictable or melodramatic, Eco manages to find a place where the reader is never really sure if what they're reading about is fact, fiction, or something in between. The conclusion is subtle, and leaves nagging doubts in the reader's mind.
The history presented in the book is top-notch, and it's never presented in a way that is insulting or "dumbed down" for the reader. Many books like this tend to include long, painfully obvious passages of exposition, but with Eco one never feels like the information is being presented by sacrificing the story. He manages exposition quite well, and everything that is presented matches the needed context of story and the characters.
The characters themselves have depth, and their dialogue never fails to make them real for the reader. I particularly enjoyed one part, early on, when the three new friends discuss a School of Comparative Irrelevance, a course of studies for useless or impossible subjects, such as "Urban Planning for Gypsies," "Morse Syntax," and "The Phonetics of the Silent Film." This passage served many purposes. On the surface level, it was extremely amusing. It also told the reader a great deal about each of the main characters in an efficient, transparent way. Finally, it serves as foreshadowing of the far broader and deeper invention these characters would soon be embarking upon. To accomplish so much in just a few pages of (primarily) dialogue is the mark of a gifted author.
Through the course of the book Casaubon has many different experiences, both mystical and mundane. Abulafia becomes more than a simple word processor, it becomes a source of truth and another veil of mystery to be pulled aside. Belbo tries to reconcile his sardonic nature with the mystery they seem to be uncovering, trying to maintain a scholarly distance while becoming more and more entranced with the story beneath the stories they hear. And Diotallevi ties everything they learn in with his own beliefs, and what truth means to him.
In the end, "Foucault's Pendulum" is a story about faith, and both the wonderful and terrible things a powerful belief can accomplish. It is also about how different people can take the same facts and each will interpret them in their own way, often wildly different from one another. Eco conveys his ideas via a compelling, original story, and in so doing makes we, the readers, think about what he has to say. It is not the facts themselves that are important, but only the connections we make between them. Perhaps, in the end, it is the interpretations, not the facts themselves, which shape beliefs... and therefore shape the events of history.
"But I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

29 people found this helpful

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J

a book for an unknown audience

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 1, 2022

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I must say that this book isn’t terrible. It’s not even bad. It’s very well written and well researched. I’m just not sure who the intended audience is supposed to be.

I was told, once, there are two ways of writing a novel. Perhaps you can call them schools of thought. There are probably more but these were the ones explained to me as a child and as such have been engraved in my brain.

The first says after you have an inkling of an idea you decide who you will write it for. Is it designed for youth or older adults? Will it be for a general population or for a specialized demographic? The answer of course, changes the language you can use, images you draw from and maturity of thought and degrees of subtlety.

The second theory says a novel is like a piece of art. You write it and some will appreciate it, others detest it, none will ever truly know the intention of the one who wrote it.

This book falls into the second category. Some will love it. Others will hate it. Some will study it and try to discern what emotion the author is truly desiring to convey. I prefer the first category. The second isn’t wrong. I simply read books to relax after a long day of work. I don’t prefer to analyze them.

I will say, that to draw any enjoyment from this text you must be well versed in various religious traditions and forms of neo-gnostic societies/ fraternities. A knowledge of several languages is also strongly encouraged. There are pages where the author transitions from English (the language I read it in) to Latin, then to French, some Italian dialects and maybe a little Portuguese or Hebrew. Otherwise, you will have a difficult time following the flow of the text.

And even if you meet these requirements (I do having studied in various seminaries and being gifted with the ability to speak languages) there is still no guarantee you’ll fully understand the meaning. You can know all about paint quality, brush strokes and lighting and still not enjoy the Mona Lisa. Same with this text.

Overall, it gets three stars for incredible depth and stellar level of research it includes. Loses two stars for overall a very weak and meandering story.

3 people found this helpful

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Alan Smithee

It was a slog …

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 1, 2022

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This book was a slog. You either have to be extremely well-versed in historical hermetic esoterica or be willing to put huge amounts of research in to follow along. He often assumes a level of knowledge on these subjects way beyond the average reader. An annotated version with footnotes would be quite welcome.

The author switches languages frequently so Google translate was helpful. However, having to consult the translator so often made reading tedious. The author frequently engages in long non-sequitors that do nothing to advance the plot. He also writes in a flowery, poetic, free-association style that makes the already dense text even harder to follow.

There’s a kernel of an original plot to the story but it doesn’t really get going until almost the 500th page. The author was obviously a brilliant man and knowledgeable in many subject areas. But I feel like taking it all in would almost require you to be as knowledgeable in them as him.

All in all, this was a bit of a painful read for me personally.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

T. G. Cooper

Surprisingly Funny

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 14, 2019

Verified Purchase

This is a wonderful sideswipe at the conspiracies found in fiction like Dan Brown and "fact" like the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
It shows what someone who understands the background to these stories can do with them, creating the conspiracy to end all conspiracies.

You have to let yourself go with the flow of the book, don't try and second guess the plot (even if you're right it's irrelevant), see where you get taken, look at the sites on the way.

It is also very funny.

8 people found this helpful

Rev. Andy

Pretentious and boring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 11, 2019

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I enjoyed this novel as a teenager but rereading it (in my 60's) has not been rewarding. There's an interesting idea in there but it drags on & on with lots of name dropping & references and very little actual insight or development. The characters are one dimensional and don't act (or speak) like real people, the motivations come out of nowhere and the action makes no sense. Sad.

8 people found this helpful

David K. Warner

Much ado about nothing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 16, 2021

Verified Purchase

Ephemeral and prolix satire on the perils of esoteric and hermeneutic learning that provides more in conception than it delivers in substance, but which, for all its coincidences and non sequiturs, remains an entertaining musing on the adage that a little learning is a dangerous thing, while simultaneously proving that an intellectual author's excessive learning when displayed on too grand a scale does not necessarily result in an entirely coherent or satisfying narrative.

2 people found this helpful

Nevison

I’ve not been read it yet

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 20, 2018

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How does it end? Why can’t I find a film about this book. I would cast Tom cruise as the elderly athlete, Dwayne Johnson as everything else with Jason statham in the wig shop. I wish Sandra bullock was younger. And Rihanna was thinner, with a smaller forehead. With a soundtrack by Terence Trent Darby and limp biscuit. Yup

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Bruce

An Author Appealing to the Lowest-Common Denominator

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 25, 2005

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As a braille proofreader, I tend to come across a lot of bad writing. Mary Higgins Clark falls into this category.
There are several problems, as I see it, with the writing of this book. One is the way Clark handles thought processes. This is not an example from the book, but illustrates my point:
Wow, thought Jean, It still amazes me that, as a girl growing up with two parents who hated each other, thus not affording me the loving environment one feels children should have, and given the horror of discovering the man I loved was dead, both of which must have scarred me severely emotionally ... And so on. The past is told through thought, and it just seems inauthentic to me.
Another problem I had was with the ending itself. I will not reveal it, but with a good mystery, the reader is left thinking, "I should have figured that out." This is not the case with Nighttime. In the case of this book, the author seems to have (badly) penned a story, and at the end just picked one character whom she decided would be the murderer. Rather than provide clues to lead readers to the murderer, all she did was mislead and provide a few dead ends.
It's a bad writing style, it assumes no intelligence on the part of the reader, and I do not recommend it.

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