Book 23: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

My schedule was slipping for a couple weeks, but we’re back on now.  Next up is Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.  It’s a bit of a mystery/conspiracy theory novel from what I understand, as well as historical fiction.  I really enjoyed The Name of the Rose when I read it a number of years ago, but wasn’t as impressed with some of Eco’s more recent novels.  Don’t get me wrong, I like Eco’s writing and all of his books that I’ve read have been good, but I’m hoping that this is a great one.

623 pages means 89 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This is the third Templar conspiracy book that I've read.  The first was Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln which was very fun and very interesting.  The second one was Dan Brown's  The Da Vinci Code which was a blatant rip-off of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and basically just dramatized the book.  This one takes on the same subject material, basically, but adds a new twist.  

Eco is a phenomenal writer, his prose is very dense and he tends to incorporate tons and tons of historical material into his writing.  There are two basic types of chapters in the book.  One part tells the story of the protagonists and those are quick and interesting.  There is lots of drama and things happen quickly.  The second type is building the historical conspiracy of the Templars and, because it's a world-encompassing conspiracy, it tends to get very, very arcane.  I wouldn't say that you could just skim through the historical material either, because he tends to build on it from chapter to chapter and he refers back to different groups constantly.  

The other thing about this book is that he uses a lot of foreign languages.  The main characters are obviously well versed in Latin and French at the least and a smattering of other languages when necessary.  With my linguistic background it wasn't much of a problem, but if you do not know at least Latin and French you may need a dictionary, or Google Translate.  I don't think that there was anything critical that wasn't in English, but you might miss some of the flavor.

All in all, I found this to be a very enjoyable read.  I still prefer Eco's The Name of the Rose but this is probably my second favorite of his novels.  It did get a little arcane with all the occult knowledge that he included, but that knowledge is critical to the plot and really is the point of the book so it's something you have to wade through to really appreciate whole product Eco presents at the end.

Rating: 8 out of 10.