(no subject)
Why did no one tell me that Foucault's Pendulum name-checks the Abbé d'Herblay?He sneers. "We met in other times, when you tried to pull me away from the deathbed of Postel, when under the name Abbé d'Herblay I led you to end one of your incarnations in the heart of the Bastille."
Coming as the reference did on page 502, I was exhilarated but not flabbergasted to see it; by that point I had come to expect that Umberto Eco would refer to every obscure esotericon he or I could think of (excluding only, strangely for a book set in Milan, any idea that Leonardo Da Vinci had encoded messages into The Last Supper); and indeed the book had been warming up to both the Jesuits and Dumas for a few previous chapters.
Someday I should make a chart of all the books I've read that take the impartation of trivia as a narrative device and match them to their respective arcana. There was once a strange period of synchronicity over about a week in which it seemed that every book I read -- Barcelona, by Robert Hughes; Martin Gardner's Science, Good, Bad and Bogus; and the Roderick cycle of John Sladek -- mentioned the Catalan scholastic Ramon Llull. I think each book had spelled his name differently, Ramon Llull in the Hughes and Raymond Lull in the Sladek with something in between in the Gardner. And, indeed, when Eco mentions him in passing it's as Lullus. Longitude and Mason & Dixon both concern themselves with the English resistance to converting from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and, lo, it's a major plot point in Foucault's Pendulum as well. The Golem of Prague, previously encountered in Roderick and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, to take two just off the top of my head, also appears briefly.
Coming as the reference did on page 502, I was exhilarated but not flabbergasted to see it; by that point I had come to expect that Umberto Eco would refer to every obscure esotericon he or I could think of (excluding only, strangely for a book set in Milan, any idea that Leonardo Da Vinci had encoded messages into The Last Supper); and indeed the book had been warming up to both the Jesuits and Dumas for a few previous chapters.
Someday I should make a chart of all the books I've read that take the impartation of trivia as a narrative device and match them to their respective arcana. There was once a strange period of synchronicity over about a week in which it seemed that every book I read -- Barcelona, by Robert Hughes; Martin Gardner's Science, Good, Bad and Bogus; and the Roderick cycle of John Sladek -- mentioned the Catalan scholastic Ramon Llull. I think each book had spelled his name differently, Ramon Llull in the Hughes and Raymond Lull in the Sladek with something in between in the Gardner. And, indeed, when Eco mentions him in passing it's as Lullus. Longitude and Mason & Dixon both concern themselves with the English resistance to converting from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and, lo, it's a major plot point in Foucault's Pendulum as well. The Golem of Prague, previously encountered in Roderick and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, to take two just off the top of my head, also appears briefly.