Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Just as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) anticipated Dan Brown’s 2003 bestseller The Da Vinci Code, so did Eco’s follow-up book Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) point the way to Brown’s The Lost Symbol (2009). I am tempted to construct a conspiracy theory to explain the convergence in the efforts of these two authors, who are themselves so obsessed w…