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A review by korrick
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
3.0
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.
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.