Baudolino

Product Information

Nature abhors a vacuum" and things rush into the emptiness of created vacua, both in the flask and in the mind. The earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the increasingly independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy.

You can't help but wonder if there is really such a thing as a small white lie in service of bigger historical truth. At one point, he falls in love with a female satyr-like creature who recounts to him the full Gnostic creation myth (Gnosticism is a pervasive presence in another of Eco's novels, Foucault's Pendulum). You can't help but ponder numerous other questions that come to your mind naturally, not because the author tried to force them on you.

The fourth novel by the prolific Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932–2016) charts the adventurous life of the eponymous hero, a medieval adventurer and consummate liar with a gift for making the most of chance. After the Emperor's death, Baudolino and his friends set off on a long journey, encompassing 15 years, to find the Kingdom of Prester John.

After a brief foray into Baudolino's youthful attempts at autobiography, the novel opens in Constantinople in 1204, at the time of the Fourth Crusade. Conflicts between the monster tribes are grounded in religious differences, and here the novel draws attention to the often spurious ideological distinctions that provoke mutual animosity. Four centuries later, in 1168, Alessandria was founded as a bastion of the Lombard League against the Holy Roman Empire. 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. To make things even more interesting, most of Baudolino's story is narrated by himself, giving the 'unreliable narrator' trope to a whole new level.During the siege, Baudolino works on the side of Frederick Barbarossa, but concocts a plan to help win the Alessandrian townspeople independence. 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. Despite being a slab of a novel it never becomes a slog nor outstays its welcome, leaving you with a nice double plot twist and possibly the best ending line ever written as parting gifts.

the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and the knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may in turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopaedic. They have no voice of their own and remain flat and two-dimensional, not fully imagined, nor yet distanced, hinted and layered. 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. In the year of 1204, Baudolino of Alessandria enters Constantinople, unaware of the Fourth Crusade that has thrown the city into chaos.It is fiction - Eco's, Baudolino's, tall-storytellers' of the ancient world - woven into the history of the fourth crusade. If the palimpsest had persisted there would have been more texture, even though it would have been irritating.

The young Baudolino’s desire to construct his own version of reality is to become a recurring theme in the novel, for when his theft of Otto’s manuscripts appears to be on the brink of discovery, Baudolino simply forges new ones from his own imagination. We can only hope that Eco goes back to the world of the adventurous medieval scholar again for his next one. Both this and the Name of the Rose are narratives within narratives, framed through manuscript fragments. It is April, 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade.The marvels of Prester John's realm are not quite Rider Haggard, nor yet a parody of Rider Haggard, nor yet a parody of Mandeville. The 'modern classics' label hadn't really made me want to get into his works, somehow making them seem even more stuffy and dreary than authors filed under 'classics'. I know for what cause you are coming, but that which you have been sent to ask cannot be done since the boy is dead. The citizens of Forum were transferred to the new city, bringing with them the remains of the saint.