This is what happens when an exceptionally clever person applies said cleverness to crafting a good story.

The basic rundown: three academics at a publishing firm, stuck reading endless Dan Brownesque conspiracy theories about the Knights Templar, entertain themselves by creating The Plan: a way to link practically every ancient historical order, religious text, ancient secret and pseudoscience into a single cohesive story. What starts as a game costs them their minds, their health, and - when actual secret societies get wind of it - a great deal more.

But before these connections can be made, and before it can all go thrillingly pear-shaped, we need context. Hundreds of pages of context.

This is not an easy book, and even throwing difficulty aside, it's simply not for everyone. Umberto Eco is not afraid to show off his (frankly intimidating) wealth of knowledge, even if it means halting the story's momentum for a meandering history lesson and adding drastically to the page count. Some portions are gripping; others were bewildering, esoteric, alienating, and had my eyes still glazing over, much to my shame, on the fourth re-reading. It's well within your rights to find this excessively intellectual tone a deal-breaker.

With this out of the way: Eco's mastery of language is an absolute joy to read. And amazingly, it does pay off. Every seemingly tangential lecture adds that little bit of extra weight to the insane and gutting payoff.

The true heart of the story, though, lies with the supporting character of Jacopo Belbo. As the narrator sifts through his friend's "mechanical brain", the computer he left behind, we find journal fragments, word games and frustrated attempts at fiction. Piece by piece, we get an intimate look at a man's entire life: his loveable quirks, the neuroses that crippled him, and the actual triumphs he never gave credit. Only in the final pages does the true message of his story - and the book as a whole - become clear.

This was well worth the effort. Mr. Eco, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Re-read. I liked it when I first read it at 19, but it gave me a lot more this time around. Requires patience and some effort, but it will be richly rewarded.

Needlessly wordy and convoluted. The author took a decent premise for a book before burying it in arcane trivia.

Finally, I am done with it. I have to admit that this made me sick from the start.

I thought Eco is a French, but learned afterwards that he is an Italian. I thought to because there are lots of French phrases. But maybe the translator just translate the Italian words into English and leave other languages as it is. There are Latin, Arabic, Hebrew phrases, too.

I find it esoteric. I think I did not read it, until when I am fully acquainted with the controversy associated with the Templar that I can able to provide good judgement with this book.

However, I read it until the last pages. And, I am happy at last that I am done with this. I am really excited for my next book.

The synopsis is somewhat misleading as the story it tells there doesn't really kick in until the latter stages of the book.

The story is told from the point of view of one of the editors 'Causabon' from his Student days in 1970's Italy, to him working with the other two editors 'Jacopo Belbo' & 'Diatollevi' at the Garramond publishing house in the late 80's and the strange cast of conspiracy theorists and occultists he meets along the way.

Causabon is a student of Philosophy of History and is writing his final dissertation on the real story of the Knights Templar during the 1st & 2nd crusades and the eventual power struggle between them, King Phillip the Fair of France and Pope Clement III which eventually leads to their arrest & disbandment.
He's then brought in to the publishing company as an expert to check the authenticity of a manuscript based around a conspiracy involving the Knights Templar/Illuminati/Rosicrucian's etc. which leads to them becoming long term friends and collaborators

The book is 641 pages long but feels way longer as it is incredibly dense with historical facts and exposition. The author, Eco, was a historian and a professor of Semiotics, which is the study of symbols and how they are used and interpreted. So as you can imagine, the attention to detail here is on another level, so much so that the story itself and the pacing takes a FIRM back seat to a huge amount on dialogue between characters about certain historical events, groups, people, places, dates and all that.

You have to really have an interest in this kind of stuff to get through and enjoy the book. Even so, I still found it a bit of a slog at some points.

I did really enjoy this over-all, but with a huge caveat that this feels more like a history textbook than an actual novel for large parts

Most reviews of this book mention The Da Vinci Code, and I'll grant at least that FP's prose is much better and doesn't assume that its readers are buffoons. Still, I felt like most of the time Eco was just trying too hard, especially at pointing out how learned he is in history, the occult, apocrypha, and deviant torture methods. I would have conceded that he's 10 times as well-read as me within the first 10 pages if he would have skipped the name-dropping throughout the rest of the book. I try to refrain from describing the work as masturbatory, but oops, there I went.

My ultimate recommendation: read The Name of the Rose again instead, and enjoy the things you missed the first time.

This is really more of a 3.5 or even 3.6 rating, but I just couldn't give it the full 4. I liked this book best when it was focused on the creation of the Plan and all the experiences they had when doing research on the diabolical occultists who they were planning to make money off of. I was less thrilled with the sequences happening directly before and after the events in the Conservatoire. All in all, its a solid whirlwind of lunatic occultist reasoning from the perspective of a man who doesn't believe the stories he and his friends are spinning but is constantly teetering on the edge of losing himself in the parody.

What the heck was this book about??! my brain hurts!