In this thread, Stranger On A Train steps outside of his forte and disparages a great book by a great author. Cervaise then steps in to add fuel to the fire.
I’m not sure if there is a precedent for Cafe Society-ing someone, but I can’t find a thread on Foucault’s Pendulum and this seems as good a way to start one as I’m likely to come up with. (Also, further discussion of the book in CoCC would constitute an unforgivable hijack.)
My position is that the book is not nearly so obstinate as it might appear on the surface and that it is far more useful than Stranger makes it out to be. (Inasmuch as any novel can be thought of as useful.)
I should mention that I am starting this thread now despite the fact that I probably won’t be able to post much until Monday morning. I am hoping the complexity of the book will keep the thread going until then.
I thought FP was mediocre, didn’t capture me at all. I’ve not got much to offer beyond that, as I’m not sure what was wrong with the novel for me. It was easy enough to read, Eco’s prose style is fluent enough, certainly when writing novels. There was a lot of medieval pseudo-scholarship that was fairly dense I suppose.
I think the problem may have been that the human side of the novel was actually pretty good, it was just buried under a ton of ecoterica that wasn’t my cup of tea. I recall thinking that his portrait of the obsession and imbalance that comes with pursuing conspiracy / crackpot theories was really well done. There is a fine passage where the wife or gf of one of the protagonists looks at the cryptic document that is central to the plot (did they write it themselves as some sort of game? a long time since i’ve read it) and says ’ this is just a shopping list’, cutting right to the heart of the delusions that the main character is caught up in.
It’s a long time since I read it, but I thought that Eco saw it as being important to
show why all the grail / Templar / Rosicrucian crap is so seductive and compelling (witness Dan Brown)
debunk it
show how dangerous it all ultimately is. Eco spent his early tears under a fascist regime and I think much of his work is aimed at demonstrating the danger of totalitarianism and preventing it from breaking out again. I don’t have a cite but I have read that he sees it as being significant that the Nazis believed in the grail / Templar etc stuff. I think that he thinks that if you open your mind to the latter then you open it to the former.
You may disagree with aspects of point 3 but in Eco you have a formidable opponent - good luck in proving him wrong!
Hmm. Calling a book “opaque” is not the same as disparaging it; “opaque” is how Joyce and Burgess and that ilk of writers are described. It simply means that the language itself is part of the value of the book; that you’re not supposed to just look *through *the language, metaphorically, at the story.
My point is that Stranger’s comment, while somewhat tongue-in-cheek, amounts to an argument from ignorance. Because,“I can['t] make heads or tails of Foucault’s Pendulum…” he determines it has “no functional use.”
I do understand that he was making a quick joke, and in context I found it amusing.
I have a problem with discounting a book because it is challenging though.
I read FP because it was recommended by a friend who overheard me say that I had read the Dan Brown collection of words in the English Language. He said it was the thinking man’s literary contrivance by Dan Brown. I saw no connection between the two books aside from the obvious. Saying that Eco handles the Holy Grail in the same way as Brown seems ridiculous to me, but the comparison is fairly obvious.
I wouldn’t expect everyone to enjoy it, but dismissing it because it is difficult irks me somewhat.
I was disappointed with the ending to Foucaut’s Pendulum. I thought it just sort of fizzled out. I’ve not seen Eco write anything that could hold a candle to The Name of the Rose.
I enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum. The first couple of chapters confused me a bit, but once I figured out which parts were “frame story”, and which parts were “flashback”, I didn’t find it too difficult.
I loved the way he took every crackpot conspiracy theory of the last thousand years, and rolled them all up into one. (Except for JFK’s assassination. But, then, Eco is Italian, so he cannot be expected to obsess over our obsessions.)
I thought that the beginning was meant to be somewhat disorienting if not outright bizarre.
As for the ending, I thought it was meant to be bizarre as well. That would make a certain amount of sense because it is the other bookend to the frame that is set up at the beginning of the novel. It was difficult to understand exactly how the description of the shape of the Sefiroth and the hanging man (I don’t think that gives anything away and I somehow doubt we need spoilers here anyway) applied to the story. That made the ending a little less satisfying than I hoped, but, again, just because it’s challenging doesn’t lessen the value of the book.