Foucault’s Pendulum

Casaubon is a scholar of the Knights Templar, working at a small Milan publishing house in the 1970s. He reads manuscripts that amateur occultists insist reveal the truth behind history. With colleagues Jacopo Belbo and Diotallevi, he starts feeding Templar legend and alchemy into Belbo's computer, Abulafia. Half joke, half editorial game, it grows into a single Plan: one chain linking every secret society since the Crusades.

The joke does not stay a joke. Word of the Plan reaches real practitioners of the occult, who take Casaubon's invention for a genuine map to buried power. Belbo disappears into a circle that has come to believe what he made up.

Casaubon traces him to Paris. He hides overnight inside the Musee des Arts et Metiers, beneath the pendulum built by the physicist Leon Foucault, waiting to learn how far the fiction is prepared to go. The narration runs back from that vigil through ten sections named for the Sefiroth of Kabbalah, folding editorial banter and genuine erudition into one long argument.

This is Umberto Eco's dense, allusive follow-up to The Name of the Rose, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. It is a novel of ideas rather than incident, built for a reader who enjoys watching a pattern assembled as a game convince people willing to die for it.