Product Description

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. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts; a talent for learning foreign languages and a skill in telling lies. One day, when still a boy, he met a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander - who proves to be the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa - adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a legendary priest-king who was said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East - a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #150574 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In Baudolino the ever ingenious Umberto Eco draws on the medieval legends surrounding Prester John--a mythical Christian emperor of the Far East--to create a sprawling, picaresque adventure yarn.

The eponymous Baudolino is the book's hero and chief, although deeply unreliable, narrator. 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. Baudolino has helped Niketas Choniates, the chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, to flee the city. As the men make their way to safety Baudolino begins to recount, with numerous digressions and contradictions, his extraordinary life story. Born an Italian peasant, Baudolino claims to have been adopted as a boy by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Sent to Paris to learn "the art of saying well that which may or may not be true" Baudolino fell in with a band of good fellows and fell in love with his stepmother. After being embroiled in the canonisation of Charlemagne; finding the sacred remains of the Magi and helping Frederick with a siege or two, Baudolino and chums, armed with the Holy Grail, set off on a particularly monster strewn journey to find the holy Prestor John. 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. --Travis Elborough

Review
Baudolino, son of a Ligurian peasant, adopted son of the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, rescues Niketas, a Byzantine court official, during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204 and during the succeeding days tells him his life story. It is a story, a game even, of two halves, for Baudolino is nothing if not ludic: ironic, parodic, fantastic, funny, tragic, occasionally tiresome, self-indulgent and above all playful. The first half recounts how Baudolino goes to school in Paris where he meets the friends who will accompany him on most of his adventures. The most notable of these is The Poet, identified with the historical Arch Poet. After Paris Baudolino drifts between Frederick's perambulating court as the emperor seeks to bind the reluctant cities of north Italy to the empire, and the people he grew up amongst, including his real father. A wooden cup belonging to his real father is taken to be the Grasal or Holy Grail and acts as the link to the second half. So far the story has inhabited a recreation of the period based on real events, with historical characters. But by now we have reached 1189, the Third Crusade. As they pass through Constantinople Baudolino and his friends, employed as Barbarossa's closest minders, pick up Zosimos, a villain. Barbarossa dies mysteriously in a locked room, Baudolino and his friends fake his historical drowning and set off on a quest to find the kingdom of Prester John, a quest which is also a pursuit of Zosimos, the presumed assassin. At this point we leave the real world of the chronicles and enter that of Mandeville's Travels. Clearly Eco has mined Mandeville and the sources behind Mandeville - we meet the sciapodes, the anthropophagi, and even men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, weird forests, rivers of stones and so on, all re-created here with often nightmareish vigour. Having survived all sorts of horrors Baudolino meets a Lady and her unicorn. She is an avatar of Hypatia, the neo-platonist murdered by Christian monks in 415, who reveals to him a neo-platonic vision of the Unique which chimes with much modern thinking about the nature of the creative impulse we used to call god. In short we are back with Eco's main concerns as a philosopher and even mystic, which informed, in a more discreet way, The Name of the Rose. Baudolino plays with philosophy, physics and metaphysics, geology, minerology, theology, just about every -ology you can think of. It is outrageously inventive, outrageously derivative. Yet the characters of Baudolino, The Poet, Barbarossa, Zosimos, the sciapode Gavagai and finally Hypatia herself are deeply realized and give the whole rambling mass a unity and human interest which make it Eco's most approachable book since The Name of the Rose. Force-fed as we are by anglophone realism (pace Pullman et al.), it reminds us how boundless the possibilities of extended fiction are. Finally,William Weaver's translation allows us to forget it is a translation, and one can't say better than that. Julian Rathbone's latest novel is A Very English Agent. (Kirkus UK)

An adventurer who boasts of his proficiency as a liar unburdens his colorful history to a skeptical Greek historian during the siege of Constantinople in a.d. 1204: in this erudite and intermittently sluggish fourth novel from the philosopher-semiotician author (Foucault's Pendulum, 1989, etc.). The eponymous Baudolino, a resourceful cross between Voltaire's Candide and Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man," is a lively enough narrator who regales his exhausted hearer (one Niketas Choniates) with the story of Baudolino's agreeably misspent youth, his accidental meeting with warlord emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and the remarkable events that ensue when Frederick effectively adopts the clever stripling (possessed of "the gift of tongues") and sends him to study in Paris. Bonding with several fellow students (including a moony would-be "Poet," a love-starved half-Moor, and a pragmatic rabbinical scholar), Baudolino thereafter undertakes to compose a history of his benefactor's exploits, helps defend a defiant city created to withstand Frederick's anticipated sacking of it, and conceives a plan to locate the legendary Holy "Grasal" (a.k.a. "Grail") and make it an offering from Barbarossa to the even more legendary Prester John, the fabulously wealthy Christian King of the Orient whose "sovereignty extended over the Three Indias . . . reach . . . [ing] the most remote deserts, as far as the tower of Babel." None of this is nearly as much fun as it sounds, particularly since action is kept to a minimum while Eco permits his characters to engage in lengthy philosophical conversations-the least defensible being Baudolino's Platonic dissection of the phenomenon of love with the beautiful half-woman, half-unicorn (Hypatia) who steals his heart. The wily cupiditous monk Zosimos, whose "necromancy" complicates our hero's efforts, has a few good moments, and there are such incidental pleasures as the glimpse of Paradise reported by Baudolino's dying father Gagliaudo ("It's just like our stable, only all cleaned up"). A little learning, reputedly a dangerous thing, can be lethal when allowed to overpower a story as relentlessly as it does in Baudolino. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
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. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts; a talent for learning foreign languages and a skill in telling lies. One day, when still a boy, he met a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander - who proves to be the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa - adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a legendary priest-king who was said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East - a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful and wordy
It is a beautifully written and a very clever book. At the beginning I could not understand where it was going, later at some point I thought that the story became unnecessary and felt like just skimming through it but at the end you see how the author took you exactly where he wanted and everything beautifully lies in its place. And the main idea of the story is just admirable. However, I would not recommend it to people who are not much into the game of words and imagination.

A good yarn
I enjoyed reading this novel, both a good exploration of the medieval fantasy of the exotic and a window into the real politics, culture and personalities of the time. The in-jokes are indeed amusing, for example the notion that the Holy Grail and the legend of Prester John were both dreamed up by the medieval equivalent of a bunch of stoned students!

It's a bit disconcerting how, after the 3rd Crusade, the characters leave a credible world to arrive in a presumably invented orient inhabited by skiapods, blemmyae, unicorns and satyrs, then returns to the real world- and how events resume there as though there were no delineated boundary between the credible and fantastic. Is the reader supposed to suspend disbelief or think 'hang on, this guy's telling porkies?' The narrative switches between first and third person, and one is lulled into taking the impossible stuff at face value.

One flaw I detected in the novel was that Baudolino tells his story to Choniates in the ravaged city of Constantinople, after rescuing him there from the rampaging 'pilgrims' of the Fourth Crusade. I can't believe the courtier would have had time or inclination to sit down and listen to someone's ramblings while his world was burning down in the background and his family remained in some danger. He would have had more pressing concerns! It would have been better to have Baudolino commence his narrative after they had all got away to safety, and things had calmed down a bit, and after Choniates would have recovered from the shock of the outrage, a shock which isn't quite adequately conveyed. Another slight criticism might be that there is little sense in Baudolino's account, of the characters aging or maturing mentally, although the story takes place over an entire lifetime. These things aside (and irrelevant theological digressions notwithstanding), I found it an engaging and at times engrossing book and would certainly recommend it.

Baudolino
Umberto Eco is known for creating difficult first chapters for his novels. If a person will not work through the first chapter of the book, then how can they be trusted to handle the complications of the remainder of the novel? This approach worked with The Name of the Rose and Foucalt's Pendulum because those novels were intelligent, clever and witty. It fails horribly in Baudolino. If you cannot make it through the child-Baudolino's first attempts at writing, do not worry too much - the rest of the novel isn't worth the effort.

Baudolino is 'adopted' at an early age by Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, who was impressed by his ability to read and write. Later, Baudolino is sent to Paris to study, where he meets various people who function as both clear and veiled references to historical figures from the time. He returns to Frederick and is part of an honour guard until the monarch's death under mysterious circumstances. From there, his Paris friends and a few others head East to the mythical lands of Prestor John. Eventually he returns to Constantinople, where he meets Nicetas Choniates, a Greek historian and tells the story of his life.

If I have glossed over the plot, it is because ultimately, it does not matter. The novel may be split into two parts, the first of which is involves Frederick, the second concerning the 'Twelve Wise Men's journey to Prestor John's land, but it is more honest to discuss the novel based on its two themes - deceit and history.

It should first be noted that Eco is a tremendously intelligent man, with an astonishing thirty honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He is a famous medievalist, and uses this knowledge as a base for the environs and times of Baudolino. This is fine - he manages to throw enough history and clever 'in' jokes into the mix to show that he is a smart man.

Now to the first theme, deceit. We are told, early on and throughout the novel, that Baudolino is a liar. The text shows this quite often, though it is surprising to note that for a novel written in the first person, as narrated by Baudolino to Nicetas, there is virtually no introspection, no thoughtful analysis, no internal dialogue. Baudolino is a man of action, though the action is poor.

So, a liar. Baudolino happens to be present at various points of significant historical interest, and it is through his self-serving and self-interested machinations that history progresses. For us, the twenty-first century reader, this is clever, because we know the truth, as it were. But it is dishonest. Baudolino makes up a variety of events and items to prove the existence of Prestor John, including creating the Holy Grail from the drinking bowl of his dead father. We chortle because everyone back then was so superstitious, we chortle because the Grail is a Big Deal even day, but ultimately, the laughter is empty. What is the point of such deceit? Is it to consider ourselves more clever and better than the people of those times? Is it to believe that Baudolino himself is more clever than anyone else? If yes, why do we care? Baudolino is a personality-less archetype, that of the wanderer. As above, there are no insights into his thoughts or motives, and his adventures aren't exciting enough to excuse this omission.

To continue further: Baudolino was educated in Paris. He could read and write in many languages. He would have known the grand scale to which his deception would reach, and yet he was willing to deceive the Church. Why? His character showed no great dislike towards religion. The argument could be put forth that it was to further honour Frederick, to enhance his greatness but again, why? The character, as shown, does not display, in thought or word, much gratification for what Frederick did to him. It is too large a leap to expect the reader to believe that a man who, throughout the narrator of his story never really praises his adopted father, would go to such world-changing lengths for him.

The second theme involves mythology. Eco draws heavily from the Nuremberg Chronicles, an early illustrated world history that is one of the best surviving examples of an early printed book. The Nuremberg Chronicles is filled with all manner of wondrous creatures: the skiapod, with its one great foot that it uses to hope along at tremendous speeds; the blemmyes, or people who have no head but a face in their chest, and so forth.

Baudolino encounters these and many other mythical creatures throughout his travels. Can we believe him? No. But, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the hands of a good author, mythological creatures are just fine. And Eco is a good author, right? No, not in this novel. He describes the weird and wonderful creatures, and then they become little more than jokes. Only one, a skiapod named Gavagai, develops a personality, but it is a joke personality. He speaks in stilted, child-like dialogue, and functions primarily as a guide throughout the world of monsters.

I suppose it is nice that Eco is writing a novel that draws heavily from the Nuremberg Chronicles, just as I suppose it is nice that he weaves history and myth into his story of the 13th century, but the question that must be asked is: Why am I bothering reading this book?

At the end we find out. A character says, 'in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.', and the text of the novel supports this. Does it matter that Baudolino lied about probably everything that ever happened to him? No, it does not. If a greater truth is revealed, it doesn't matter how many lies are told. But Eco has no greater truth. The idea that history changes based on our perception is not new, nor is it worthy of devoting an entire book.

Perhaps the worst part of this novel is that there are other authors who write historical fiction better than this. Generally, a lot of what is written is pulpy, but the authors usually provide a strong plot, strong characters, and no end of excitement. Take that away, and we have a history book. Sadly, Eco doesn't even provide this, because the history we have is too full of lies, and what is true is not fully explained. In the end, we have a book that could have been done better by almost anyone, and which has virtually no reason to exist whatsoever. Eco is a better writer than this book shows.