Obsolete Your Idols

I finished reading my first book by Eco yestereve,  Foucault’s Pendulum.  This is another one of those books where my co-workers, seeing me read it, had opinions about it.  My boss loves it and the CEO has re-read it several times.  Contrariwise, another co-worker hated it.  This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to read Umberto Eco, but it’s the first time I finished.  Perhaps, like Catch-22, I needed to age into it.  It’s got a lot of things I enjoyed in The Illuminatus! Trilogy and I can see where it would lend itself to increased enjoyment with re-reading.

One frustration I had with it is that parts of it are in languages I don’t read and, in fact, it was originally written in a language I don’t read, giving me the impression that there’s much more going on there in the text than I can understand.  If I re-read it, I’ll have to do it with  different dictionaries, one for Italian, one for French, one for Latin.  Ideally I’d learn Italian and read it in the original but I don’t know if there are enough years left for that.

The story itself is structured as a pair of nested flashbacks and there are other flashbacks embedded inside of it.  The core conceit of the work (the Plan) is that it’s constructed through a randomization of text fragments, strikingly like the reputed method PKD used when writing The Man in the High Castle, so there’s another literary parallel which I found enjoyable.   Ultimately, though, I wasn’t as happy with the shaggy dog story flow where it all boils down to “bad things are going to happen because people are gullible”.

What I liked

• whirlwind tours of occult history
• characterizations of minor characters, thin and sharp as a thumb’s nail
• presentation of alternative explanations for history’s events
• references and call-outs to other works I’ve read

What I didn’t

• sometimes hard to follow conversations in languages I don’t read
• not a real sense of closure at the end of the story

Who might enjoy this book

• occultists, diabolicals, fans of conspiracy for the sake of conspiring
• members of spiritual knighthoods
• late modernist readers who like texts they can deconstruct and still have something left to hold
• polymaths and multilinguists