Synopses & Reviews
Three clever book editors, inspired by an extraordinary fable they heard years before, decide to have a little fun. Randomly feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all their entires, they think they are creating a long, lazy game until the game starts taking over...
Here is an incredible journey of thought and history, memory and fantasy, a tour de force as enthralling as anything Umberto Eco or indeed, anyone has ever devised.
Review
"[The book] is not meant to be easy....[But] great are the rewards for those who actually manage to read it....You may call the book an intellectual triumph, if not a fictional one." Anthony Burgess, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"An intellectual adventure story, as sensational, thrilling and packed with arcana as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Count of Monte Cristo." The Washington Post Book World
Review
"[This novel] is several books wrapped up in one, some more successful than others....Although scholarship is supposed to be Eco's forte, the erudite sections of [the novel] are perhaps [its] weakest elements....[But] interest invariably picks up when the novel returns to Belbo's personal experiences." The Atlantic Monthly
Review
"As brilliant and quirky as The Name of the Rose, as mischievous and wide-ranging....A virtuoso performance." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"The narrative eventually becomes heavy with the accumulated weight of data and supposition....Until that point, however, this is an intriguing cerebral exercise in which Eco slyly suggests that intellectual arrogance can come to no good end." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A]n intellectual triumph." New York Times Books of the Century
Synopsis
A superb cerebral entertainment about three editors who cook up a hoax involving the Templar Knights, Stonehenge, the Cabala, and Brazilian voodoo, among other things that suddenly becomes all too real.
About the Author
Umberto Eco was born in 1932 in Alessandria, Italy. He is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, a philosopher, historian, literary critic and aethetician. He is the author of the international bestselling novels The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before, as well as three collections of popular essays, Travels in Hyperreality, Misreadings, and How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays. Mr. Eco lives in Milan.