Simon Rees
Pressure of a Cork
Foucault’s Pendulum
By Umberto Eco (Translated by William Weaver)
Seeker & Warburg 629pp £14.95
Now if it had been Michel Foucault’s pendulum…but the Foucault in this case is Jean Bernard Léon (1819–68), and it is beside his pendulum, a copper sphere on a long thin wire suspended and swinging from the vault of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, that the narrator Casaubon waits patiently through six hundred pages of post–modernist prose for the climax of Eco’s second novel. So any speculation about the other Foucault’s pendulum would seem irrelevant, even irreverent, except that, having been conjured up accidentally, the shade of the great historian of sexuality hovers inexorcisably over the whole work.
Casaubon’s colleagues at the Garamond Press, ‘a small but serious publisher’ in Milan, are called Belbo and Diotallevi: one automatically looks about for a character beginning with ‘A’. There are three: the first is Abulafia, Belbo’s faithful computer, repository of his confessions and musings, instrument of his anagrammatical calculations whereby
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
literaryreview.co.uk
India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
literaryreview.co.uk
Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
literaryreview.co.uk