Cool story about secret societies.

I was disappointed by this book, though I hold Name of the Rose in such high regard that it would have been difficult to top.

The middle section of this book is much too long and quite boring. I was only able to keep pushing through because Eco is a superlative writer, and it's at least always fun to read. (If that's possible, for it to be simultaneously fun to read but boring? But what I mean is that he's a delightful technical writer, though the plot suffers for his fun sometimes.)

2.5/5

I have a particular dislike of the trope of time travel in my fiction reading. As someone who enjoys historical fiction as well as a health dose of nonfiction, I find the whole premise too much of a muddle to trust that the author isn't either copping out or otherwise giving their internal biases too much wiggle room. This book may technically concern itself with merely a decade or so (longer if you take into account the narrator's borderline homoerotic obsession with another man's tea-soaked madeleine excursions among his childhood days spent in WWII Italy), but there's so much near copy paste of entire tracts from pre-Wikipedia with only the thinnest film of dialogic structure to excuse its appearance in a purportedly fictional narrative that I needed a healthy dose of end-notes or at least a footnote to tie me down. Alas, all this desiccated mass market paperback, complete with a worryingly dark stain spanning across the bottom portion of its pages, had to give me were sections where the font became even smaller when recreating text files of white boy worrying pulled out of an early computer. Still, when the text stopped vomiting facts and actually started paying attention to the human and the technology on the basis of experience rather than theory crafting, it had some interesting things to say about people connecting the dots without paying attention to the soul (why conspiracy theorists so often turn antisemitic, if not straight up fascist), computers generating the hidden secrets of all religions and then some (not sure if Eco would have lost it with this latest "AI" business or been disappointed by all the technofeudalist grifters), and all those rebels inventing themselves a cause. It's hardly going to swerve me in my path from armchair critic to union steward (or convince me to read another Eco), but I'm just glad I got something out of this book what wasn't memetic metafiction oroborousing itself into an early grave.

P.S. Fans of this book should check out this online game called 'Infinite Craft,' see if they can find the secret lexicon of ultimate power at the heart of that one.

struggled in the middle a lot but i did quite like the ending. it could have been maybe 250 pages shorter quite comfortably.

when it sang it really sang. and it was deeply funny, and like all the best scholarly adventures made you feel very smart when you understood the references, and only a little lost when you didn’t - although he did write it before google.

there is so much discourse about conspiracy theories now that some of the book’s ideas feel a little flat, but not all of them. it’s definitely better than the da vinci code.

My main memory of this is that it was utterly inscrutable.

È una storia ricca di intrecci e lo stile di Eco la fa apprezzare ancora di più, sia per il suo modo di caratterizzare e far interagire i personaggi sia perché la "morale" è di lasciar perdere le ricerche di Graal, tesori e segreti sperduti (cose almeno per me terribilmente noiose, infatti la parte del Piano è stata un polpettone).
Insomma, Eco è un genio, altro che Dan Brown.

I bumped this novel up on my "to read" list after Eco died in 2016, and am glad that I did. The premise of the novel is that the protagonist and his friends at a publishing house in Milan start specializing in authors writing on occult and obscure topics, and the three begin to make a game out of creating their own conspiracy theory that they call "The Plan" by mish-mashing cabala with Rosicrucianism and mystical strains of Islam, witchcraft, Knights Templar and other bits of arcane knowledge. They think of it as a joke, but they realize someone is taking their Plan seriously when people start to go missing. The man's novels are NOT easy reads, but I didn't mind it. Sometimes I want a challenging read. I enjoyed this and plan to read more by Eco.