Baudolino

Product Information

Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian novelist, medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic. 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. There's just one other thing that marks Eco out as being not only master of this genre but also of others. Nature abhors a vacuum" and things rush into the emptiness of created vacua, both in the flask and in the mind.

It turns, like the Christian religion, on questions of paternity and the presence of the divine spirit in matter such as the blood and wine of the Eucharist. He was talking about Dante the visionary and Galileo the cosmographer, but he himself, and Umberto Eco, also work from the same impulses. This is Eco's field and the debates are both detailed, obscurantist, comic and brilliantly baffling.In 2000 Umberto Eco, a native of Alessandria, published his novel Baudolino, in which the eponymous twelfth-century hero meets the saint as a boy on a number of occasions "in the Frescheta woods there specially when there's real fog when you can't see the tip of your nose. Eco is a student of the varieties of inventiveness with which we fill up the spaces of our knowledge and our experience, from air to corpuscles, from daydreams to poems, from lies to myths, from forgeries to monsters. He is said to have been the son of a noble family, but to have given all his wealth to the poor before moving to a miserable hut near the river.

You can't help but wonder if there is really such a thing as a small white lie in service of bigger historical truth. It is a modern would-be rollicking tale, sprawling over time and place, fact and fantasy, and - apart, significantly, from its opening - it has no real voice of its own. 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.It is a peculiar kind of novel where the difficult ideas are more interesting than the swashbuckling, or the sex, or the death, or the gruesome objects. Born in 1137, in what later becomes the city of Alessandria, a chance childhood encounter with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Great rescues Baudolino from his impoverished environment. Throughout the book Eco forces Baudolino to straddle the fine line between comic and tragic, and whenever Baudolino, tired of lies, tries to reach for something true or real, it's always jerked away from him at the last moment. 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. Credo quia impossibile" (I believe because it is impossible), Tertullian said about the Christian story.

Without in any way being dry or academic, Eco puts us right in the middle of the philosophical debates of the age, linking us at first hand to Barbarossa, Abelard and Eloise.

Up until this point, Baudolino follows Eco’s previous novels in its mixing of detective fiction with philosophical speculation, producing a complex discussion about the nature of history. Eco is in a long line of fantastical Italian authors of whom the latest is Carlo Rovelli with his stories of warped space-time and quanta which are simultaneously there and not there; both theories being proven but cannot both be true. 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 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.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.