#foucault's pendulum

[thirdity]

Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[fish-in-the-aqua]

The briefest description of feelings from 'Foucault's Pendulum' by Umberto Eco:

[jurakan]

One of us lies and one of us tells the truth

Uh... I don't know if this is a request for a Fun Fact, but if it is... the 'lies' remind me that someone recently recommended Dan Brown books to us, and he's a hack, so Today You Learned what Umberto Eco thought about him!

I feel like today, Umberto Eco is mostly talked about for his essay describing fascism. Fair, I guess, but he was also an author, and one of his most famous books was Foucault's Pendulum, a book in which a group of history publishers make up their own wild conspiracy theory involving the Knights Templar. This causes problem when it becomes clear that someone is taking the conspiracy theory seriously and tries to act on it.

It's a really weird book, guys.

Given The Da Vinci Code, a lot of people drew connections between the two books--personally, I'd say Foucault's Pendulum is "The Da Vinci Code if it wasn't written by a hack". Well, when asked about it, and the author Dan Brown, Eco said:

"I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist."

Which is amusing.

[I also think somewhere he described Dan Brown as being something like his literary bastard child, but I can't find that quote...]

[specificpollsaboutbooks]

Favorite BOOK about Books

Round 1

Look Back (Tatsuki Fujimoto) VS Il Pendolo de Foucault | Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco) VS Beach Read (Emily Henry)

Look Back

Foucault's Pendulum

Beach Read

Show results

Voting ended onMay 5

NO ANTIPROPAGANDA PLEASE

Propaganda under the cut

Foucault's Pendulum:

Belbo, an editor at a publishing house, receives a manuscript about a conspiracy theory where the Knights Templar are planning to conquer the world. He and his friends Casaubon and Diotallevi, two Templar scholars, decide to create their own conspiracy theory based on it, for fun. But as they continue working on it, they start to believe it's really true, and their fictional secret society is stalking them.

Beach Read:

romance author and Literary author both have writers block and challenge each other to swap writing styles (and fall in love)

[literary-illuminati]

So is it just On a Winter's Night A Traveler and Foucault's Pendulum or is 20th century Italian literature in general just Like This?

[snowlithills]

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[myclutteredbookshelf]

What should I read next? 🍵📖❄️

The Odyssey by Homer

1984 by George Orwell

Beirut Hellfire Society by Rawi Hage

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers

Voting ended onJan 2

Help me decide what to read in January.

If you vote, please reblog for a greater sample size.

[very-grownup]

Which reminds me of what De Angelis had told me about the synarchy. The fine thing about the whole story -- our story, and perhaps also History itself, as Belbo hinted, with feverish eyes, as he handed me his file cards -- was that groups locked in mortal combat were slaughtering one another, each in turn using the other's weapons. "The first duty of a good spy," I remarked, "is to denounce as spies those whom he has infiltrated."

Belbo said: "I remember an incident in ***. At sunset, along a shady avenue, I always ran into this guy named Remo -- or something like that -- in a little black Balilla. Black mustache, curly black hair, black shirt, and black teeth, horribly rotten. And he would be kissing a girl. I was revolted by those black teeth kissing that beautiful blonde. I don't even remember what her face was like but for me she was virgin and prostitute, the eternal feminine. And great was my revulsion." Instinctively he adopted a lofty tone to show irony, aware that he had allowed himself to be carried away by the innocent tenderness of the memory. "I asked myself why this Remo, who belonged to the Black Brigades, dared allow himself to be seen around like that, even in the periods when *** was not occupied by the Fascists. Someone whispered to me that he was a Fascist spy. However it was, one evening I saw him in the same black Balilla, with the same black teeth, kissing the same blonde, but now with a red kerchief around his neck and a khaki shirt. He had shifted to the Garibaldi Brigades. Everybody made a fuss over him, and he actually gave himself a nom de guerre: X9, like the Alex Raymond character whom I had read about in the Avventuroso comics. Bravo, X9, they said to him. … And I hated him more than ever, because he possessed the girl by popular consent. Those who said he was a Fascist spy among the partisans were probably men who wanted the girl themselves, so they cast suspicion on X9. …"

"And then what happened?"

"See here, Casaubon, why are you so interested in my life?"

"Because you make it sound like a folktale, and folktales are part of the collective imagination."

"Good point. One morning, X9 was driving along, out of his territory; maybe he had a date to meet the girl in the fields, to go beyond their kissing and pawing and show her that his prick was not as rotten as his teeth -- I'm sorry, I still can't make myself love him. Anyway, the Fascists set a trap for him, captured him, took him into town, and at five o'clock the next morning, they shot him."

A pause. Belbo looked at his hands, which he had clasped, as if in prayer. Then he held them apart and said, "That was the proof that he wasn't a spy."

"The moral of the story?"

"Who said stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die."

- Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco