Baudolino

Product Information

Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention.

Niketas is amazed by his language genius, speaking many languages he has never heard, and Baudolino begins to recount his life story to Niketas. The creatures themselves turn out to be in constant dispute about the substance of the Son and the Father, the real and the fantastic mirroring each other. Baudolino has helped Niketas Choniates, the chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, to flee the city.

Having read a loved Eco's The Name of the Rose, I bought this as a Christmas present for a friend who's into medieval history and literature. Some of the children's historical novels by Treece, Treece and Sutcliffe move us in this direction, but, of course, lack the glowing, informed, adult picture that Eco brings to the story. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. My experience of Umberto Eco has been mixed - loved 'Name of the Rose', hated ' Island of the Day Before'.

In the year of 1204, Baudolino of Alessandria enters Constantinople, unaware of the Fourth Crusade that has thrown the city into chaos. However, Baudolino differs from Eco’s previous fictions in that after the death of Frederick, the novel’s attention shifts from historical events to the medieval obsession with the fantastic journey. You can't help but wonder if we can really be sure that the entire portions of not just religious but secular history weren't just manufactured out of thin air. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again.

The citizens of Forum were transferred to the new city, bringing with them the remains of the saint. This combination of palimpsest and mixed colloquial Latin, Italian, German and other languages does give Baudolino a substantiality and a knottiness which he loses when he simply starts talking. Eco uses this focus on lies and lying to interrogate our understanding of history, presenting it as a collective illusion that is constructed to fit the demands of the present rather than the events of the past.

Teaming with Eco's customary metafictional games, intellectual jokes and elaborate (and even ludicrous) theological discussions, this novel is possibly his most accessible, and arguably enjoyable, since The Name of the Rose . Baudolino, both a beloved adopted son to the Emperor and a loyal native of the newly founded and highly rebellious town of Alessandria, plays a key role in reconciliation between the Emperor and the Alessandria townspeople, who are led by Baudolino's biological father; a way is found for the Emperor to recognize Alessandria's independence without losing face. Here, in this set-piece, is a clue to why this novel is not, as a novel, anywhere near as successful as The Name of the Rose.He gets involved in the business of fake relics - several dried heads of John the Baptist, nails of the True Cross, and finally the lost Grasal, or Grail, the Cup of the Last Supper, which Baudolino invents by using the worn wooden bowl from which his dying (real) father drinks. My friends, Rabbi Solomon said to calm us, human folly has imagined horrific crimes, from Cain on, but no human mind has ever been so twisted as to imagine a crime in a locked room. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

During the siege, Baudolino works on the side of Frederick Barbarossa, but concocts a plan to help win the Alessandrian townspeople independence. It carries its formidable learning lightly, using it both as clues and as red herrings, as set-pieces and as rich background, interesting all sorts of readers quite incidentally in medieval theology and Aristotle. He marries, almost incidentally, a 15-year-old girl who dies in childbirth and gives birth to a real, dead, monster. His collections of essays also include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.Even when he is sent to Paris to be schooled (and to avoid his growing attraction to Frederick’s new wife, the young Empress Beatrice), his habit of generating false realities continues. In Baudolino, Eco has created a worthy literary rival to Frasers' 'Flashman' and, like Flashman, Baudolino inadvertently becomes embroiled in great events of his own accidental making. He talks a kind of rushed slapstick - he sounds like a popular historical romance of, perhaps, the 1950s - and his author's control of the pace and tension of his narrative is much less secure than it was in The Name of the Rose. He attempts to convince the emperor's forces that Alessandria is more prepared for a siege than them through stuffing a cow with the last of Alessandria's wheat and sends the cow out to the Emperor's forces.