SOURCE: “A ‘Sam Spade’ of Culture Explores Modern Age Mysteries,” in The Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 82, No. 1, November 27, 1989, p. 13.

D'Evelyn is general editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. In the following review, he sketches the plot and narrative significance of Foucault's Pendulum.

Full of tangy, crunchy morsels of history, fiction, and theory, Umberto Eco's new novel [Foucault's Pendulum] is like a salad bar. It's all good for you—and at 641 pages there's plenty of it; it boasts the occasional hot pepper of insight; and it may serve as an appetizer or to clean the palate after the roast beef and potatoes of more serious fare.

But what could be more serious than a serio-comic interpretation of the modern mind? Like Erasmus and Swift, Eco plays the fool to teach us better about ourselves. Unlike his best-selling The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum is short on...