Starting off 2024 doing some heavy lifting: first I read one of the more difficult Italian novels in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, then tackled the nearly one-million-word novel, Clarissa, then knocked out a smaller book on life in Italy, and now this month I launched into Il pendolo di Foucault, an 800 page Italian novel, probably the longest I’ve read in Italian.
Il pendolo di Foucault- Umberto Eco (1988)
This is an exceptionally involved work. The novel is essentially about conspiracy theories and how people are drawn into them.
The basic story is told by the main character, the student Casaubon. He meets an editor of an academic publishing house, and when asked what he studies, Casaubon replies that he is studying the Knights Templar. Casaubon is told by the editor, Jacopo Belbo, that all of what he has come across in this field are crackpot conspiracies written by delusional kooks. Casaubon acknowledges that there is a lot of legend surrounding the knights, but he is concerned only with the verifiable history.
But Belbo invites Casaubon into a discussion with one such writer who outlines his own studies of the what happened. This man is convinced that he is on the point of uncovering a vast conspiracy. Belbo and Casaubon both conclude he is bonkers, but he disappears the next day.
Casaubon then moves to Brazil where he meets and falls in love with a young Marxist. He discovers links between some of the mystic Afro-Brazilian religions and the legends surrounding the Knights.
He returns to Italy where he and Belbo decide on a ruse: to formulate and elaborate their own ‘plan’ of what happened to the Knights Templar. But circumstances lead them to start to wonder if their made up plan is actually true.
The book is 800 pages, and filled with detailed explanations of how these things fit together. These discussions serve to illuminate how even educated people can come to see connections when those connections aren’t really there. The issue started in these cases with the belief and acceptance of some repository of secret knowledge. This meant that access to that knowledge included interpreting things in a type of code. Doing so required reading things symbolically, and that in turn leads to any manner of intellectual gymnastics that will make sense of things in the individual’s mind. So the conspiracy theorist can take just about any number of elements he finds, and if he can reinterpret their meaning to find what he feels is a workable connection, he can find justification in believing they are connected in the way he always intuited them to be.
One of the lessons from all this is that in order even to fake a web, it has to look valid, which in turn requires one to be so intimately acquainted with the theories that he doesn’t suggest an obvious error. In emerging oneself so deeply in these theories though, he risks losing his objectivity and becomes himself engrossed in the web, even knowing it was his own invention.
But as he cleans up all the connections, he begins to wonder if there really is something to the order he has created.
Someone asked Eco once if he was a predecessor of Dan Brown and the DaVinci Code. Eco responded that Dan Brown would have been one of the characters in this book.
The Italian City-Republics – Trevor Dean and Daniel Waley (1st edition 1969, 5th edition 2023)
This is a textbook of the Italian City-Republics. The Italian City-Republics generally covers the time period of around the late 900’s to the 1200s, and the geographical area of the Po Valley and the area of Central Italy covering Tuscany to Pisa. The Papal lands of Central Italy and southern Italy developed under different circumstances- effectively under a more complete imperial control, that didn’t allow the kind of independence that occurred in the north.
In northern Italy, there were alternating technical imperial controls from France and Germany, but those kings were generally too far removed from Italy to exercise direct control. This meant that the cities were, in effect, left to govern themselves independently. From there, they developed their own institutions of local governance. They pursued their own local interests. They developed relations with neighboring cities based on their own interests. They moved from control by local ecclesiastical authorities, who had wielded the effective power in their jurisdictions, to secular authorities who were elected. They went through the process of seeing their economic success lead to an increased business class, who began to assert their combined power against the nobles. They also went through the process of uniting ever larger geographic areas under the aegis of both Florence, Genoa, and Milan to stand up against the larger threats. Interestingly enough, many of these same dynamics played out 1500 years earlier in the Roman Republic.
The basic reason why the republican governments didn’t last was factionalism. Unfortunately, self-government seemed to turn small differences into larger. Compromises and ‘agreements to differ’ were set aside and recourse to violence between factions became a conventional way of settling differences.
Republics usually end because they are unable to provide stable regimes. A single ruler who is able to get things done is seen as a more acceptable alternative.
When an effective single leader found his way to power, the people would eventually find a way to increase the length of his office, until he became the ruler for life.
But, of course, the arrival of the Signorie, the absolute rulers, in Italy didn’t just happen either. There were power hungry men who saw the opportunity and schemed and fought for it too.
Black Beauty- Anna Sewell (1877)
A fictional story written from a horse’s point-of-view. The story tells the life of a horse about the types of good and bad treatment received from humans. It would be a kind of horse’s rights story, meant to instruct people to treat their horses, and by extension, their animals well.
A Doll’s House- Henrik Ibsen (1879)
Henrik Ibsen was a Danish/Norwegian playwright. This book contains four of his plays, of which A Doll’s House was the titular most famous piece. The other plays are Pillars of the Community, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People. Ibsen became known as the Father of the Modern Drama. He wrote plays that were meant to depict contemporary, real people in their speech. He said the days of Shakespeare were gone, and so he wasn’t concerned with writing poetic depictions of life.
Pillars of the Community was fantastic. Really great plot that kept me engrossed all the way through.
A Doll’s House was a little dull to start, but picked up right at the end.
Ghosts is the shortest of the four plays and like the others, brings to light actions that the characters would rather have remained hidden. The title refers to the remnants of past actions that continue to haunt those that try to bury them.
An Enemy of the People tells the story of a man who finds there is something seriously wrong with the main source of business for the town. He tries to do the right thing by alerting people but finds that people are not at all pleased by the potential shut down of their revenue. They all turn on him and he finds himself having to stand nearly alone.
Heidi- Johanna Spyri (1881)
A children’s novel about a young Swiss girl who manages to positively affect everyone she comes into contact with.
The Awakening- Kate Chopin (1899)
A sort of first-wave feminist manifesto. Edna is a young mother who is growing disillusioned with her life, which she feels has been scripted. While she has a loving husband who idealizes her, she recognizes that he doesn’t really get her. He sees her purely in terms of her role as “his” wife, and “the mother of his children”. She grows increasingly independent. She loves another man, but realizes that even there, eventually she would tire of him too. She ends by swimming out to the ocean and drowning as the only way to escape what she feels is a trap.
Les Fleurs du Mal- Charles Baudelaire (1867)
The Flowers of Evil is the title in English of this compilation of all Baudelaire’s poetry, written between 1840 and 1867. The book starts with this haunting poem addressed-
To the Reader:
Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
Torment our bodies and possess our minds,
And we sustain our affable remorse
The way a beggar nourishes his lice.
Our sins are stubborn, our contrition lame;
We want our scruples to be worth our while-
How cheerfully we crawl back to the mire:
A few cheap tears will wash our stains away!
Satan Trismegistus subtly rocks
Our ravished spirits on his wicked bed
Until the precious metal of our will
Is leached out by this cunning alchemist:
The Devil’s hand directs our every move-
The things we loathed become the things we love;
Day by day we drop through stinking shades
Quite undeterred on our descent to Hell.
Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites
The withered breasts of some well-seasoned trull,
We snatch in passing at clandestine joys
And squeeze the oldest orange harder yet.
Wriggling in our brains like a million worms,
A demon demos holds its revels there,
And when we breathe, the Lethe in our lungs
Trickles sighing on its secret course.
If rape and arson, poison and the knife
Have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs
Onto the banal buckram of our fates,
It is because our souls lack enterprise!
But here among the scorpions and the hounds,
The jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,
Monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,
In all the squalid zoo of vices, one
Is even uglier and fouler than the rest,
Although the least flamboyant of the lot;
This beast would gladly undermine the earth
And swallow all creation in a yawn;
I speak of Boredom which with ready tears
Dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.
Reader, you know this squeamish monster well,
-hypocrite reader, – my alias, my twin.
Unfortunately, this was the best piece in the entire book, so… yeah.