Which works by Michel Foucault should I be familiar with before jumping into this? I heard Umberto Eco is very thorough in his research for his novels.
>>24862114I dont like Umberto Eco. But you should read all of Foucaults books because they are all good.
>>24862114I know this is bait but in the off chance somebody doesn't know that the philosopher michel foucault has nothing to do with this novel and the pendulum is something created by a physicist of the same name by whom you don't need to have read nothing in order to get into eco's book
>>24862123Oh
>>24862137The good news is you can enjoy Eco's novel and read Foucault anyway!
>In the same vein my last novel is entitled Foucault’s Pendulum because the pendulum I am speaking of was invented by Léon Foucault. If it were invented by Franklin the title would have been Franklin’s Pendulum. This time I was aware from the very beginning that somebody could have smelled an allusion to Michel Foucault: my characters are obsessed by analogies and Foucault wrote on the paradigm of similarity. As an empirical author I was not so happy about such a possible connection. It sounds like a joke and not a clever one, indeed. But the pendulum invented by Léon was the hero of my story and I could not change the title: thus I hoped that my model reader would not try a superficial connection with Michel. I was to be disappointed; many smart readers did so. The text is there, and maybe they are right: maybe I am responsible for a superficial joke; maybe the joke is not that superficial. I do not know. The whole affair is by now out of my control.
Tried reading this with a friend and we didn't finish it. It's not bad per se, quite witty and atmospheric at times. But it's just not all that immersive imo, sure the "drawing connections to everything" is fun to read, but I find there's a bit of a lack of actual mystery to the book, and there's other authors that do the paranoid fiction thing better. And the little romance there is is kinda meh
>>24862307It's not paranoid fiction in itself, it's merely about paranoid fiction.
>>24862114I really don't think you need toread Foucault at all for this. The Name of the Rose would be more useful, even Pynchon would help more, perhaps the WW2 era Calvino stories in order to get a better take on the emotional aspect of Italy's war humiliation. Why that matters may not be apparent till the final chapters
>>24862115I like Umberto Eco. But you shouldn't read any of Foucault's books because they are all bad.
>>24862307The main plot doesn't really kick off until 400 pgs in
