A serious question: Is the entire book written from the point of view of the crazy guy? I’ve only gotten a few chapters in, and getting inside that guy’s head is already tiring.
And no, I don’t have any assignment on the book-- I’m just curious because I enjoyed The Name of the Rose, and Focault’s Pendulum comes highly recommended.
Yes, Causabon is the narrator of the whole book. And once you get past him hiding in the Conservatoire, and he starts describing his first meetings with Belbo and Diotallevi, it gets a bit easier to follow. The beginning of the book is actually the end of the story, and by then, Causabon’s grip on reality is a bit shaky. The only real difficulty of the main expository section of the novel is all the scholarly references and allusions. But it’s definitely worth sticking with.
Yeah, I gathered that it was out of sequence like that, but I’m already past the Conservatoire part, and the crazy is still enough to be distracting.
Before this thread dies, could someone give me a good rundown of the science behind Huxley’s The Island?
That’s what makes me keep going back to it every so often - chances are I’ve read something that unwraps another batch of them. Eco’s books are usually phenomenally hard going on the first read but boy do they keep on giving.
I’ve read this book 4-5 times, although not for a couple of years, and I don’t recall the narrator seeming crazy for most of the book. I just thumbed through my copy, and by the third chapter things are (for an Eco novel) fairly straightforward. It sounds to me like you just don’t like the writing style.
There’s some odd stuff in South America, as I recall. If you get to the discussion of pinball playing & the publication company and are still not liking it, it’s probably time to give up.
There is odd stuff in the South American section, but nothing I recall as being obviously crazy. In light of things that happen later one might question whether everything described in this section really happened as described, but IIRC everything is at least within the realm of plausibility. Fairly minor spoiler:
At one point the narrator and his girlfriend attend a voodoo ritual, and the girlfriend falls into a trance and starts shaking or dancing around or something. When she comes out of it she’s extremely embarrassed. The reader is not asked to believe that she was really possessed by a spirit though, and IIRC the narrator doesn’t seem to think that’s what happened either.
What, there are cool things like vampires, zombies, and brain extractors in this book? I could never get past the first couple of chapters of thinly veiled authorial narcissism prattling on and on about the chores of editing and word processing and the horrible burdensome life that writers lead :rolleyes:
But if there are Illuminati nosferatu zombie priests, then I’ll give the book another shot. 
What if they’re really just a ploddingly done metaphor for book editors?