Some parts of this book are beautiful, poetic, funny, and engrossing. The basic story, a satire of publishing, the occult, and conspiracy theorists (among others) is strong. However, for reasons that totally confound me, at least a third of this book is made up of what basically amounts to Eco doing bullshit free-association.

I remember at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (who Eco once claimed was actually a character he had created) says that - while the plot is fiction - all of the various claims in the book about Da Vinci, the grail, and so on, are all true. Eco, meanwhile, explicitly states that his characters are going to make up a global conspiracy ("the Plan") to profit off of credulous conspiracy theorists. Having established that it will all be hysterical nonsense, he then spends maybe 1/3 of the book's total length going into extraordinary detail describing all of this nonsense.

The cover features a pull quote that compares the book to "Raiders of the Lost Ark". I can see the parallels, except imagine that a full 40 minutes of Raiders was just Indy sarcastically inventing a long account of the journey of the Ark and all the false stories that were made up about it.

All of the positive reviews of the book don't seem to cover pages 350-500, which is just this nonsense. The entirety of chapter 75 is a bunch of dates and events that explicitly are made up and don't mean anything.

I could forgive this book for a lot, if so much of it didn't explicitly feel like a waste of my time.