An encyclopedic detective story . .. . .
But their joke becomes all too terrifyingly real when people begin to disappear mysteriously, beginning with the Colonel.
The editors are convinced they\'ve devised the ultimate literary joke, a game to consume conspiracy theorists, mystical buffs, and everyone else fool enough to play.
Using a computer, into which they enter bits of information on the Knights Templar, Satanic initiation rites, Rosicrucianism, the measurements of the Great Pyramid, and supernatural and occult phenomenon, they create 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.
The editors, bored from tooling with manuscripts on the occult and inspired by the colonel\'s outlandish claims, devise a literary prank for their own amusement.
A man named Colonel Ardenti tells three cynical book 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.
With this book, Eco puts himself in the grand and acerbic tradition of Petronius, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire.-- Chicago Tribune Rich and witty.-- Newsweek Infused with history and crackling suspense, Umberto Eco\'s celebrated international bestseller--a cerebral classic, prescient of our own times, about a literary joke that goes terribly awry, unexpectedly plunging its creators into mortal danger. . . .
An intellectual triumph.--Anthony Burgess Foucault\'s Pendulum is Eco\'s magical mystery tour of the Western mind. . .
An encyclopedic detective story
