'But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempts to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth' (Eco, pp 95).
I don't always write about how a book made me feel, but when I do, it's because I genuinely cannot help it. And I've just finished Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, and it is exactly the sort of book you need to talk about in order to wrap your head around.
I was aware, tangentially, that Eco had an excellent grasp on the follies of human nature, but this one really hits it out of the park. It is weird, wild, and frustratingly ambiguous right up until the very end. And I would dare to say that's the point. Causabon and Belbo are not characters to be understood, I think, no matter how one might relate to one or both, or how they try to understand each other. And if the understanding of the self as mastery of the world is not the theme of this book, I will found a secret order and create a Plan to make sure that it becomes so. If you get it, you get it.
Eco's expression of the deep psychological desire for control and the very human need to pull order and structure from chaos makes for an incredibly interesting read; with a slow build and a tumultuous rush to the bizarre ending, it drew me in and twisted my perceptions until I, too, was trying to make sense of Abulafia's connections. It's a poignant commentary about the need for meaning and the willingness of the human mind to deceive itself, if only that meaning can be attained; 'A Plan, a guilty party. The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it's His fault' (Eco, pp 528).
Also, I now know way too much about Templar conspiracies and esoteric rituals; the research for this novel must have been insane. This novel is insane. 641 pages well-spent, I would say.
'We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration. What frustration? Belbo's last file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr' (Eco, pp 619).