Foucault's Pendulum

As fans of Ishmael Reed's masterpiece novel, Mumbo Jumbo, Naoki Urasawa's Twentieth Century Boys, as well as Chris Carter's Millennium (although the second season was not exactly in the vein of what Carter would have done), we finally read Foucault's Pendulum. This is a novel we endeavored to read a few years ago on a Kindle but due to its length and subject matter, a text like this is meant to be read in physical form. Umberto Eco has created the ultimate anti-occult, anti-conspiracy theory book using a conspiracy and invented Tradition. This zany tale involves everything from Jewish mysticism, alchemy, Ism'ailism, and Candomble to the Templars, Rosicrucians, Paulicians, Nazism, Freemasonry, telluric currents and the Jesuits. It is also an excellent work for the bibliophiles and book editors, since the Plan concocted by the 3 Italian editors is really a masterful work of erudition and throws a number of references to major texts in the history of Western literature, esotericism, and even popular culture (Mickey and Minnie Mouse, for instance). 

In terms of the novel's structure, most of it is really Casaubon narrating the previous steps that led to him staying in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris after hours to witness an occult gathering of various Diabolicals (believers in various strands of occultist knowledge who come to believe in the Plan concocted by Belbo, Casaubon and  Diotallevi). Occasionally, journal entries or literary pieces from the computer, Abulafia, of Belbo, provide additional narration of events that shape the novel. By the end, the three book editors, who initially approached the subject of the Plan with an inventive sense of humor, find themselves trapped in a whirlwind of curious and dangerous events. Along the way, Belbo is forced to revisit his memories of the latter days of Fascist Italy and lost opportunities while Casaubon tries to find another, deeper, meaning in the plethora of invented esoteric currents mixed together to in a deep way. 

While Umberto Eco did not seek to undermine the racial and Eurocentric biases that Ishmael Reed highlighted with Jes Grew, he managed to produce an intellectually sophisticated look at how the occult mind works and distorts to create new realities to make sense of their zeitgeist. This is why for each period, newly  invented "Tradition" is adapted to make sense of the world in the search for a higher truth. Perhaps more of the Diabolicals should have thought like Casaubon and Lia did about their own philosopher's stone...