content: Eco's "The Name of The Rose" was a dense but excellent multilayered novel of medieval thought, history and politics cleverly organized by a plot aimed more at revealing the mindset of a changing period than telling a 'story' per se. "Foucault's Pendulum" attempted, less successfully, to do the same thing. With this novel Eco appears to have concluded that history is interesting enough not to require more than the most casual of plots to introduce; he's wrong. We've seen most of these ideas before, especially the thinly-disguised mean-spirited anti-clericalism that fuels the novel's 'wit'. Eco desperately needs the discipline of working in the short-story format!