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Foucault's Pendulum
Current price:
$17.99
Publication Date: March 5th, 2007
Publisher:
HarperVia
ISBN:
9780156032971
Pages:
640
Description
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
Praise for Foucault's Pendulum
“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
“By turns scholarly, spooky, satirical and deadly. . . . No reader is likely to stop reading. Or want to.” — Washington Post
