It has been a while, hasn't it? I did not think it would take me this long to read this. It's a novel, it will be fun. It shouldn't take that long right. I was wrong. I had forgotten the experience of reading The Name of the Rose in college. I was seduced by the blurb on the back cover. I did not comprehend Umberto Eco. Of course, life also had its hand in delaying me. I had to bury my grandfather one week and celebrate the wedding of a friend the next. But, I found this book hard to read.
I enjoyed and breezed through the first 300ish pages. The book's opening is great. The mystery of the missing friend, the attempts to break the password by being cleverer and cleverer, and then the revelation that the password is No, and that the way to get to the truth was to avoid clever overcomplicated solutions and be simple is great hook when you have read the back blurb. The blurb promises a story about people in over their heads, who endangered themselves by being too clever. The opening delivers on this really well. That momentum carried me forward for about 300 pages. But that is where my problems with the structure of the books dragged my enjoyment of the book down.
I feel like I would like this book better if it was two or three books. One that covers the blurb, one about a young boy's life in occupied Italy and how that shaped the rest of his life and a history of the Knights Templar conspiracies. That way these interesting ideas get their own space. The novel really has two protagonists, the protagonist in whose mind we exist, and Belbo, the protagonist of the occupied Italy story. Where these two stories meet is very awkward, and the themes do not seem to interact. So at 300 pages, when I felt the pace slow down and I was wondering when we were going to get to the thing I bought this book for in the first place, the editors inventing a conspiracy, I checked the page count. 641 pages. I was not even halfway done. That was a crushing revelation for my reading speed.
I dragged myself through the rest of the book. There are long sections that I found completely unengaging, and the language itself became more long-winded and introspective. The novel I thought I was getting appeared every now and then, but it didn't feel like enough. When it finally got to the part where the editors put together the computer program it feels rushed. There are other, less interesting, and more forgettable sections of the book that feel lavished with pages, but the thing that got me interested in reading the book feels a bit secondary. At the end, it feels even more rushed, and the danger they unleashed with their program that invents connections overtakes them far too rapidly to be interesting. When I was done I felt relieved.
Would I recommend Foucault's Pendulum? Not unless you are a fan of classic literature, or prefer your novels more focused on thought and impression. If you liked Albert Camus I think you would be right at home, but it has been a while since I read anything by him. That idea got me thinking. I am not sure how well the novel traditions of France and Italy translate into what English readers of the internet age think of as a novel. It seems that modern novels focus more on telling an entertaining story than delving into some deeper meaning, and I am there for that. I doubt fictions ability to show the truth about humanity and the human condition because it is fiction. Someone made it up. Can fiction have meaning? Absolutely, but if you want the truth about human nature read a bunch of history books.
