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Foucault's Pendulum
- Narrated by: Tim Curry
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
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Publisher's summary
The editors, who have spent altogether too much time rewriting crackpot manuscripts on the occult by fanatics and dilettante, decide to have a little fun. They'll create a Plan of their own. But how? Randomly they throw together manuscript pages on hermetic thought: The Masters of the World, who live beneath the earth. The Comte de Saint-Germain, who lives forever. They add Satanic initiation rites of the Kings of the Temple, Assassins, Rosicrucians, Brazilian voodoo, the Third Reich. And they feed all this, and much more, into their powerful computer. Abulafia. A terrific joke, they think, until the Plan assumes a life and power of its own, and turns deadly...as people mysteriously begin to disappear, one by one, starting with Colonel Ardenti.
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- By: Katherine Neville
- Narrated by: Susan Denaker
- Length: 25 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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New York City, 1972: A dabbler in mathematics and chess, Catherine Velis is also a computer expert for a Big Eight accounting firm. Before heading off to a new assignment in Algeria, Cat has her palm read by a fortune-teller. The woman warns Cat of danger. Then an antiques dealer approaches Cat with a mysterious offer: He has an anonymous client who is trying to collect the pieces of an ancient chess service, purported to be in Algeria. If Cat can bring the pieces back, there will be a generous reward.
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Best Plot-Driven Novel I've Ever Read
- By Tango on 09-08-13
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Half-Made World
- By: Felix Gilman
- Narrated by: Tamara Marston
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The world is only half made. What exists has been carved out amidst a war between two rival factions: the Line, paving the world with industry and claiming its residents as slaves; and the Gun, a cult of terror and violence that cripples the population with fear. The only hope at stopping them has seemingly disappeared - the Red Republic that once battled the Gun and the Line, and almost won. Now they're just a myth, a bedtime story parents tell their children, of hope.
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Terrible Story, Terrible Narrator
- By Aaron on 10-21-10
By: Felix Gilman
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The Meursault Investigation
- By: Kamel Daoud, John Cullen - translator
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus' classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: He gives his brother a story and a name - Musa - and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.
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An enthralling double feature!
- By Kaui on 06-28-16
By: Kamel Daoud, and others
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The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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And There Was Light
- The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II
- By: Jacques Lusseyran
- Narrated by: Andre Gregory
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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When Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the world around him. In 1941, when he was seventeen, that world was Nazi-occupied France. Lusseyran formed a resistance group with fifty-two boys and used his heightened senses to recruit the best. Eventually, Lusseyran was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in a transport of two thousand resistance fighters.
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One of the three most important books in my life
- By William R. Stevenson on 12-12-15
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In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
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One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
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The Moor's Last Sigh
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile.
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The performance is enchanting.
- By Kelly on 05-04-18
By: Salman Rushdie
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Aleph
- By: Paulo Coelho
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him. Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion.
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Strangely compelling read
- By Kathy in CA on 11-22-11
By: Paulo Coelho
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Narrator irritating and characters unsympathetic
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Numero NADA!
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On the Shoulders of Giants is a collection of essays based on lectures Eco famously delivered at the Milanesiana Festival in Milan over the last 15 years of his life. Previously unpublished, the essays explore themes he returned to again and again in his writing: the roots of Western culture and the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the potency of conspiracies, the lure of mysteries, and the imperfections of art.
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big ideas presented simply
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And Excellent Book, A poor Audio
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Foucaults pendul
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"Foucaults pendul" er en usædvanlig underholdende roman, med en spændende handling og et mylder af mærkværdige – men altid troværdige – personer. Som et motto foran i bogen står: "Overtro bringer uheld" og det er netop dette tema Eco i mange variationer gennemspiller i bogen. En af romanens hovedpersoner er Milanostudenten Casaubon, der skriver speciale om middelalderens Tempelriddere. Han kommer i kontakt med de to forlagsredaktører Belbo og Diotallevi.
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By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis.
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Not applicable
- By Tarik on 08-07-15
By: Umberto Eco
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Portobello
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Ruth Rendell is widely considered to be crime fiction’s reigning queen. In Portobello, she delivers a captivating and intricate tale that weaves together the troubled lives of several people in the gentrified neighborhood of London’s Notting Hill. Walking to the shops one day, 50-year-old Eugene Wren discovers an envelope on the street bulging with cash. A man plagued by a shameful addiction - and his own good intentions - Wren hatches a plan to find the money’s rightful owner.
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Portobello's Lovely Mean Streets
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Baudolino
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In quella zona del basso Piemonte dove, anni dopo, sorgerà Alessandria, Baudolino, un piccolo contadino fantasioso e bugiardo, conquista Federico Barbarossa e ne diventa figlio adottivo. Baudolino affabula e inventa ma, quasi per miracolo, tutto quello che immagina, produce Storia. Così, tra le altre cose, costruisce la mitica lettera del Prete Gianni, che prometteva all'Occidente un regno favoloso, nel lontano Oriente, governato da un re cristiano.
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
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Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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The position of the feet during reading...
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The Music of the Spheres
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With The Music of the Spheres, Elizabeth Redfern emerges as an evocative and elegant writer of startling power, her gifts for characterization, atmosphere, narrative, and rich moral drama marking her as a new star in her own right.
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The little know world of emigre London, circa 1795
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Soul Mountain
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Facing time on a prison farm for defying his country’s laws of cultural conformity, artist/writer Gao Xingjian embarked on an epic search for his roots and for freedom. His journey through Southern China’s ancient mountains and forests, inspired this immensely wise and beautiful novel.
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Disappointing
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By: Gao Xingjian
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The Last Templar
- By: Raymond Khoury
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- Unabridged
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As the burning city of Acre falls from the hands of the West in 1291, a young Templar knight, his mentor, and a handful of others escape to the sea carrying a mysterious chest. In present day Manhattan, four masked horsemen dressed as Templar Knights steal a strange device. In the aftermath, an FBI investigation is led by anti-terrorist specialist Sean Reilly. Soon, he and archaeologist Tess Chaykin are drawn into the dark, hidden history of the crusading knights.
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Fantastic
- By Michael on 05-17-07
By: Raymond Khoury
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Parallel Stories
- A Novel
- By: Péter Nádas, Imre Goldstein - translator
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 58 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary’s different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war.
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I wish I could return this
- By Rayos X on 05-19-12
By: Péter Nádas, and others
What listeners say about Foucault's Pendulum
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Caleb Figgers
- 12-31-16
Extreme Abridgement Ruins Experience
Would you try another book from Umberto Eco and/or Tim Curry?
I would love to listen to an unabridged version of this book.
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
The story is great, there's just too much description missing.
Which character – as performed by Tim Curry – was your favorite?
Tim Curry does a phenomenal job with the text he's given, and he's a perfect selection for this book.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
Not likely--the essence of this book is the colorful description. The poetic details would not transfer to a screen.
Any additional comments?
Unabridged would be so much better.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Parker
- 08-17-04
Absolutely Brilliant!
Tim Curry does an exemplary job reading Eco's brilliant meditation on the nature of secrets, of life, and the pursuit of truth and beauty. Having read the book twice before, I knew it intimately, and expected to be disappointed by the abridgement. To my surprise, the novel crackled along so well that it took me a while to realize what was missing: Belbo's diaries telling of his battles with fear and self-doubt, the tales of Seven Seas Jim, Don Tico's band, and the word games played with Belbo's computer Abulafia.
Contrary to earlier reviews, the book listens brilliantly, with much warmth, humor and suspense. It might also be your best introduction to Eco. Nor does the ending leave one wanting; Eco knows how to make his novels end with moments of deep revelation. I can say without hesitation that Foucault's Pendulum is one of the greatest books I have ever read (three times!). It will forever hold a special place in my life.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Cherry
- 01-31-12
Wonderful narration, adequate abridging
I really would love to give the story higher marks because Umberto Eco's book is a masterpiece. I purchased this audiobook in a sale without even thinking to check if it were unabridged or not. While the editing does get across the general idea of the story so much of the emotion, fear, paranoia and surreality is just lost. It's a shame that audible does not have an unabridged version.
However, if like me you have read the book before and just wish to listen casually to remind yourself of its brilliance then this audiobook is very well narrated and Tim Curry really manages to bring life to the characters with the limited material.
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- Jon Phelps
- 08-14-20
A marvelous, meaningless mystery.
The window dressing of Eco’s novel is about as esoteric as they come. In the many turns of this story, there are countless nods towards obscura and archaic history that I did not (and likely never will) quite understand or even notice. Yet instead of souring the book, the flowery divergences add a wonderful color to a frantic, compelling mystery novel of sorts that had me laughing in one breath and chewing my lip in another.
If you like conspiracy, this is the boo for you. If you have an unhealthy fascination with literary theory, that recommendation goes double. If you just enjoy a strange tale full of colorful characters and sharp writing - well, you get the idea.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-17-21
Tim Curry is the absolute master of audiobooks
A great abridged version of this magnificent book.
Narrated by the unsurpassed Tim Curry.
He's the narrator and He goes into character. Each character. From the curious Casaubon, the cynical Belbo, the suave and cunning Aglié and the enigmatic Lorenza Pellegrini.
He breathes life into each of them.
This is a classic that I keep coming back to.
Also, for those who find the unabridged version or the book too daunting, this is a great introduction to the novel.
I would count this among the best of the many TimCurry readings. The man is a treasure.
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- sam polly
- 07-21-18
Is this a series?????
I need more. This was great! It was well read and written verrry well. Thank for this book it's like an acid trip in words
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- JC
- 08-21-21
Abridged version leaves too much out
I read this book in the mid 00's and again in the next 2010s, I often recommend it to people who will appreciate the styles and themes that Eco plays with and likes to make fun of conspiracy theorists with me. The book's focus on conspiracy theories and the monsterous consequences of provoking the crazies have made it unwittingly relevant to the modern zeitgeist (I'm writing this review in 2021).
I decided to check out the abridged version because it's a long book and there are passages that I think I would cut from a modern edition. Like, in the book there are long passages expressing fascination with the word processor, it's relevant to paint Belbo's relationship with his work and the written word, but it's a difficult headspace for a modern reader. the audiobook cuts that out, and that's fine, but it cuts out quite a bit of Belbo's other writings. The cuts hue too closely to the core plot and loses the themes and characters that make the book impactful. There really isn't much here, the edit follows Casaubon (the narrator) at the expense of the deep dive into Belbo's descent. It's a book about ideas, I think they cut too many ideas out.
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- Kamion
- 09-21-21
A Tale in Wisdom
Tim Curry narrating brings this story to complete fulfillment. An precursor intellectual telling similar to a Dan Brown theme.
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- John
- 05-23-12
Good performance yet a less than expected story.
Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
Umberto Eco
I am not sure what this book means in the end. . .
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- Kindle Customer
- 05-14-15
I liked it.
Interesting premise. Well thought out. I did not like the ending. But overall i enjoyed this book. Would read again.
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