Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Amy.

For some reason, this is the second book in this series of reviews by Umberto Eco - apparently my friends are collectively convinced I need to read more of his books. I can't disagree - I've quite enjoyed all of his books that I've read. What's more, I found this one really funny. I mean, it wasn't a barrel-of-laughs-a-minute, but there were frequently bits that made me laugh out loud. Often enough that this will stick in my head as a very funny book.

Which is weird, because I'm not sure it would hit most people that way. It's fairly dense prose, and I think you have to know a certain amount of what he's writing about to get the parts that are amusing. Or maybe they would be funny to everyone, I might be underestimating people. I don't think I am, though.

What I kept telling people about this book when I was midway through it is that it reads like it's one of two possible results of having read a bunch of those Templar/Rosicrucian/Blood of Christ conspiracy theory books (like Holy Blood, Holy Grail) that were all the rage. One way to go would be completely unironically, a la Da Vinci Code, a treasure hunt with a material ending. The second way, the way of Umberto Eco here, would be with an extremely liberal dollop of irony, humour, and literary analysis.

In Foucault's Pendulum, the main character and his two friends work for a dodgy publishing house - one side self-publishes authors and pockets most of the money, the other puts out a few genuine publications, and is moving into the realm of the occult. The main character (whose name I don't remember!) did a very sober, scholarly thesis on The Templars, so as the book begins, he is called into his friend Belbo's office to go over a manuscript someone has submitted to the self-publisher.

It's a mishmash of conspiracy theories, all held together by duct tape and string. This leads to some delightful talk about truth and belief, and how people sometimes convince themselves that "able to be conceived of" is the same as "true."  If they can think of something that might have happened, that assumes the same force as it having happened.

Eventually, the main character and his two friends start to come up with their own Templar conspiracy theory in jest, bringing together disparate bits and pulling them together into something that sounds coherent but is really a big mess. And it was mostly through these sections that I kept finding funny bits - logical leaps that are breathtaking, stated plainly, and then people taking them as givens. Or the fake plan, the creators mimicking that, but almost falling into the fallacy as well.

It's a tour of all the weirdness in historical conspiracy theory, blown up to extreme proportions. I'd tried to read it years ago, but I was certainly much more ready to actually plow through it this time. And I'd read the last few pages before embarking, so I knew the ending, and that certainly helped, giving everything that happened a slightly different feel.