What was the genesis of Foucaults Pendulum?
Immediately after finishing The Name of the Rose, my question was: Was this an exceptional episode of my life or would I be able to write another novel? I thought that probably all the images that obsessed my mind were in that book. So if I were to write another novel, what would it be about? And I thought, O.K., there are two images that were important in my life. One was the pendulum, which I saw for the first time in 1952. I remember that I was fascinated. And many other times I came back to see it, and I talked about it with certain scientists. The other was the story of the boy it the cemetery with a trumpet. That really happened to me in 1945, and I told his story many times. The question was: What is the connection between those incidents? If they were so important to me, I thought, it means that there is a connection. And I started to look for a connection, and that was the start. Why is the notion of conspiracy and plotting so important to Foucault’s Pendulum? In some ways, my
