SOURCE: A review of Foucault's Pendulum, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 87-8.

In the following review, Ragusa anticipates two sorts of reader responses to Foucault's Pendulum.

By the time this review is in print, the English translation of Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) will be in the bookshops and a new chapter in the ongoing “Eco case” will have begun. For what has more and more engaged the imagination with respect to an Eco novel are the contexts within which it appears and the reactions that reflect back on the product—a process attentively and amusingly detailed in a recent article by Rocco Capozzi, “Troppi movimenti intorno al Pendolo di Eco!” (Quaderni d'Italianistica, Autumn 1988).

Eco “readers” can be divided into two camps: those who can forget themselves in the labyrinthine construction of his “stories,” where digression is heaped on digression, although a unifying thread...