Word: pendulums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ever the provocateur, Wolfe is enjoying the controversy. Agreeing cheerfully that his piece is indeed self-serving, he now adds to his list of targets Italian best-selling writer Umberto Eco, whose latest novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is a phantasmagorical venture into the occult. "Eco," Wolfe says, "is a very good example of a writer who leads dozens of young writers into a literary cul-de-sac." Harper's plans to throw more fuel on the bonfire. Editor Lapham will devote a large part of his January issue to responses and rebuttals to Wolfe...
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $22.95). Eco has woven together a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose. Beneath its endlessly diverting surface, this book constitutes a litmus test for ways of looking at history and the world...
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM...
...named Casaubon hides after closing time in a Paris museum called the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Nearby, an enormous pendulum swings silently in the gathering darkness, mute testimony, as a 19th century French scientist named Foucault first demonstrated, to the rotation of the earth. Casaubon is here because he suspects something terrible will happen before dawn. If he is correct, then he and two friends, playful inventors of a plot to rule the world, do not have long to live. In their machinations, have he and his coconspirators accidentally stumbled across some dangerous truth? Or, % perhaps worse, have their...
From this spooky, arresting premise, Umberto Eco has launched a novel that is even more intricate and absorbing than his international best seller The Name of the Rose (1983). Unlike its predecessor, Foucault's Pendulum does not restrict its range of interests to monastic, medieval arcana. This time Eco's framework is vast -- capacious enough to embrace reams of ancient, abstruse writings and a host of contemporary references or allusions. The latter include the Yellow Submarine, Casablanca, Tom and Jerry, Lina Wertmuller, Barbara Cartland, Stephen King, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Flash Gordon, the Pink Panther, Minnie Mouse...