Foucault's Pendulum

“As brilliant and quirky as The Name of the Rose, as mischievous and wide-ranging . . . A virtuoso performance.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
A literary joke plunges its creators into mortal danger in this captivating intellectual thriller by celebrated author Umberto Eco.

A Colonel Ardenti starts it all: He tells three editors that he has discovered a coded message about a centuries-old Knights Templar plan to tap a mystic source of power greater than atomic energy. The editors, bored with rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult and amused by his fantastic claims, decide to cook up a Plan of their own. Into their computer they feed manuscript pages on Satanic initiation rites, Rosicrucianism, the measurements of the Great Pyramid—and out comes a map indicating a point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled, a point located at Foucault’s Pendulum in Paris. A terrific joke, they think. Until people begin to disappear mysteriously, starting with the colonel . . .

“An encyclopedic detective story about a search for the center of an ancient, still-living conspiracy of men who seek not merely power over the earth but the power of the earth itself . . . An intellectual triumph.” —Anthony Burgess, The New York Times Book Review

UMBERTO ECO is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the bestselling author of numerous novels and essays. He lives in Milan.