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Lesley

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Foucault's Pendulum

by Umberto Eco

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Lesley said: " Foucault’s Pendulum isn’t just my favorite Umberto Eco novel. It isn’t just my favorite novel. It is the single most impressive and important book I have ever read.

I first read Foucault’s Pendulum in Dutch when I was sixteen years old. I had just go Foucault’s Pendulum isn’t just my favorite Umberto Eco novel. It isn’t just my favorite novel. It is the single most impressive and important book I have ever read.

I first read Foucault’s Pendulum in Dutch when I was sixteen years old. I had just gotten into reading “headier” books and read Harry Mulisch’ The Discovery of Heaven prior to this. Foucault’s Pendulum was recommended to me by a coworker, who told me to not be concerned with understanding all of it and just let myself get overwhelmed with it. It took me three weeks to get through it and at the end my whole view on the world, conspiracy theories and the intellectual arrogance was changed forever. In the 22 years since that, I’ve tried to reread it at least once a year and it still never fails to impress me. Even after reading all his other novels and dozens of his nonfiction books, Foucault’s Pendulum still stands as the single piece of writing that has shaped my way of thinking the most.

It’s a really contradictory book, though, which is mirrored in its characters. Take Belbo, for instance. The eternal coward who only finds courage in the one moment the realization sets in that every belief he’s put his trust in throughout his life is false. It is only in death that he’s able to accept that the ones he feared throughout the story are just as lost as he is. Same for Casaubon, who is more hesitant to accept The Plan as “real”, but still vigorously tries to defend it when Lia exposes the flawed basis for it. It is the nature of people to want to understand and explain everything, which is why the smartest among us go to the greatest lengths to avoid accepting that sometimes things are the way they are for no reason. Malkuth is Malkuth and that’s that.

Foucault’s Pendulum has a really straightforward message that gets intentionally buried in a seemingly disjointed plot and a narrative that, at first read, gets bogged down in information overload and pages upon pages of dialogue on philosophical discussions that seem to bear little relevance to what is happening. In the surface, it’s about two editors employing a student to give feedback on manuscripts and, growing bored, deciding to manufacture a conspiracy that dates back hundreds of years. As they get deeper and deeper into this conspiracy, which they’ve dubbed “The Plan”, they stumble upon members of long hidden societies and begin to realize that they’ve stumbled upon an actual conspiracy. Or have they?

Even though Foucault’s Pendulum is Eco’s longest novel, for me it’s the one that is the most enjoyable read. It has 120 short chapters divided into ten parts, each of which is linked to the ten Sefiroth, the emanations through which Ein Sof reveals itself and through which universal order is created. It is the search for this order that turns out to be the downfall of so many character in this novel. It is also this obsession with finding order that is ultimately criticized the most. Even in an age where the whole of human knowledge is available to us, the refusal to accept things as they are will lead us to believing exceeding irrationality in trying to deflect from that acceptance. ...more "

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(page 380 of 632)
— 18 hours, 13 min ago

Apr 02, 2026 07:52AM · see review