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 extraordinary epic, brilliantly-imagined, new novel from a world-class writer and author of The Name of the Rose. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion 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.
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