SOURCE: “Umberto's Truffle Hunt,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 5, 1989, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder describes the themes and critical techniques of Foucault's Pendulum.

Umberto Eco's new novel [Foucault's Pendulum] is an artichoke with 641 leaves and not much heart. There is some real pleasure in artichoke leaves, but what with the work and the scratchiness you probably wouldn’t undertake one unless you thought there would be a heart in it.

True, in Foucault's Pendulum the absence is part of the point. Its elaborately branched story about the search for an ancient secret whose possession will confer world mastery is both an illustration and a parody of the contemporary literary doctrines of semiology and structuralism.

Eco is a professor of semiology and a novelist, author of The Name of the Rose. His new book is a bravura series of variations and reverses on the structuralist view...