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RIP Umberto Eco


odessasteps

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Man, thanks for posting this. I just started Foucault's Pendulum and I don't get most of the references, but I am determined to figure it out. Eco is fascinating and I want to honor him by tracking it all down. Does anyone have any pointers for this book?

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I would imagine a lot of people give up on Foucault's Pendulum pretty quickly.  I got a nice new hardcover copy 2 Christmases ago, to replace the old paperback that I must've read a dozen times before it fell apart.  The new one had obviously been returned by someone that had given up on it.  The first few chapters had a bunch of words underlined in pencil, some of which had definitions written in the margins.  That stopped after about 4-5 chapters, so I assume that's when they gave in and returned it.

 

Every time I read that book, I pick up on new things that I missed or overlooked previous times. I'm still not 100% sure I know what happened, when it's all said and done, especially scenes where Eco is intentionally vague or misleading.  

 

Ardenti's disappearance and the events in the Conservatoire are the two things that stand out here.  I still don't know what happened to Ardenti, or whether Casaubon really saw him in Paris.  I'm sure Belbo and Lorenza died the way Casaubon saw, based on the evidence he picked up at other times, but a lot of the details of that night seem too fantastical to have really happened 

 

 

 

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Same here. I read The Name of the Rose back when I was in high school. The movie about the book is fine, but the book really makes the clash between medieval church and early Renaissance feel so tangible. A couple of years ago I tried to read Foucault's Pendulum during a summer vacation (38° C are probably not the best conditions to read such a book) and quit after a couple of pages. I guess I will give it another try in the near future.

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I read all the way through Foucault's Pendulum (as for how much I actually understood...) and I think getting through the first bit of it is the hardest thing in the entire book.  It's often still... dense like that but you become better acclimated to it and learn that sometimes you just have to skip over a word or seven. 

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