Foucault's Pendulum

tags: conspiracies, historical fiction, mystery, satire


from GoodReads

A superb cerebral entertainment about three editors who cook up a hoax - involving the Templar Knights, Stonehenge, the Cabala, and Brazilian voodoo, among other things - that suddenly becomes all too real.

I read my favorite Eco novel almost 20 years ago and read it a second time this past week to validate my 5-star rating. A GoodReads reader didn't like the book which is perfectly fine, however, he declared on his comment that readers who loved and gave a 5-star rating are pretentious, never really understood the book, and just want to look "intellectual". He is projecting obviously, but why diminish other readers' opinion of the book. It irked me and to that reader: Ma gavte la nata.

I still love the book and maybe even more so after this second reading. It is not an easy book to read with the dizzying amount of information and heavy on foreign languages but it is also fascinating, informative, and often LOL funny.

When I first read it, I haven't read George Eliot's Middlemarch yet and now that I have, I understand and appreciate why Eco chose the name Casaubon for one of the three men who concocted an elaborate story to make fun of and probably to warn people who believe in conspiracies.

Highly recommended.

Numero Zero

 tags: conspiracies, dark humor, mystery, politics, satire 

goodreads

From the best-selling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, a novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder.

A newspaper committed to blackmail and mud slinging, rather than reporting the news. 

A paranoid editor, walking through the streets of Milan, reconstructing fifty years of history against the backdrop of a plot involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double. 

The murder of Pope John Paul I, the CIA, red terrorists handled by secret services, twenty years of bloodshed, and events that seem outlandish until the BBC proves them true. 

A fragile love story between two born losers, a failed ghost writer, and a vulnerable girl, who specializes in celebrity gossip yet cries over the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh.

And then a dead body that suddenly appears in a back alley in Milan.  

Set in 1992 and foreshadowing the mysteries and follies of the following twenty years, Numero Zero is a scintillating take on our times from the best-selling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

I read this thoroughly engaging satirical, timely, and often hilarious short novel in late November 2015. It's the second to the last written by Umberto Eco, who has died at the age of 84 last Friday. I learned that he wrote his last book to be issued posthumously later this year. I'm looking forward to it. It's a sad day for me and his fans worldwide. Rest In Peace Signore Eco

Highly recommended for Umberto Eco readers.