Baudolino

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Summary: Bilbo Baggins discusses the true nature of God.
Review: I read "The Name Of The Rose" and loved every page. This, by comparason, was a big let down. Slow going, and I can't say I was ever really interested. Would not suggest.

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Summary: Entertaining, Occasionally Maddening Medieval Romp
Review: I will not bore you with a re-cap of the entire plot of the book, suffice it to say that the title character is a charming liar who, in recounting the "story" of his life following the collapse of Byzantium, manages to take credit for being at every seminal moment in late 11th century history. Eco's most delicious skills as a writer are put to good use in this entertaining tale: his rich use of language, and sense of mischief really shine in Baudolino. But...not all of it works as well as Eco may have wished. There are long passages which might be fascinating to a medieval studies professor, but leave the average intelligent reader stifling a yawn. Read it, but know what you're getting into (I kept a dictionary by my bedside to look up obscure words and object descriptions). That said, there are as many vignettes that delight, move, and entrall (the section where Baudolino meets and falls in love with a Hypatia, weaving ancient Greek myth into a tale already packed with fantastic creatures is nothing short of brilliant). And you have to admire the fact that Eco's final line, archly delivered by Baudolino, is clearly a tongue-in-cheek jest at himself. With so winning an author, it's hard not to like his creation.

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Summary: How History Was Made
Review: A necessary disclaimer in reviewing any translated book is that it is a depreciated version of the original, though the best we've got. Every translation also gives off an unintended impression that the original text does not to a native speaker. In this instance, it seemed that in this simplified tone and jumpy pace this book could easily qualify as fantasy or an adventure novel for teenagers.

Obviously, there is much more to it than that (themes often lose the punctuation they receive from the lyricism of original language). Eco tackles the Middle Ages with the aplomb of a diligent historian. It is easy to tell how much the author loves his subject in his detailed though fortunately not harping narrative jaunts into the Crusades, the ignorant barbarism of the Crusaders, the politics of church and state before the two were separated, the romantic celebrity of civil nobility in a stifling caste system, the schism between the Christian East and West, dreams of discovery in a time when the world seemed flat and less finite - full of wonder, relics, and scientific curiosity.

We follow the unlikely adventures of Baudolino, son of a simple Italian farmer who is adopted by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and given unimaginable opportunities, setting on a lifelong dream quest of exploration, adventure, and transient romance. The story is told by Niketas, a Greek nobleman listening to Baudolino's story, as Eco does not forget to kindle the issue of narrational trust. Here this is especially crucial as we are reading autobiographically-skewed history. If history is written by the victors, Baudolino proves it can also written by imaginative farmers given the right opportunity and disciples.

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Summary: A slowly depressing novel
Review: Baudolino is a book that argues many theological issues as well as providing great climaxes incorporated into an intelligent adventure.
Baudolino begins his story in the middle ages in Italy where he has minor adventures involving ducking out of chores by lying. Caught in one of his lies, he runs into the woods where he is discovered by the Holy Roman Emperor, Fredrick Barbarossa. He has many travels with Fredrick and gains many valuable friends along the way. Unfortunately, his friends guard Fredrick's room one night and he dies. They are accused of his murder. To escape, they try to complete the age old quest of finding Prester John, an ancient bible priest. They do not find Prester John, but they find his son, a deacon living in a small town besieged by the White Horde. Baudolino raises an army of the exotic creatures in the land to fight the Horde. Because of some bad luck, they lose miserably. I would recommend this book to all people with an interest in history and those with a very high reading level. This book contained parts in Latin as well as many difficult religious concepts. I enjoyed this book, but the action was somewhat delayed. As a summary, this book was difficult, slow on action and suspense, and somewhat depressing.

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Summary: When I was young, I loved fairytales, today I love Baudolino
Review: While reading, I want to run away from everyday life. When I was young, I loved fairy tales, myths and legends. Today I love Baudolno. This book transferes me into another world, another time where I met different people.
Eco, with his unique imagination, interweaved the life and the death of Fridrich I and the life of fictious Baudolino. Big and small historical facts, banal and bizzare details from medieval life, West and East expertly exposed with a lot of humour and irony, in a playfully connected story. Could the history be like this? Eco reveals big truth about historical truth.
Read this book to meet Baudolino and his friends whose motives are not ordinary and mundane. Characthers of this novel really cheered me up. What aims! What means! What a contrast to today's materialistic and consumeristic world.
While I was reading the book I laughed and entertained myself, but at the end I was left in dilemma. Should I laugh because history is mocked, or should I be sad because Baudolino still searches his Utopia. If you are philosophiclly minded find the answer by yourself, reading Baudolino.

I agree with some reviewers that the novel has some flaws, like unnecessary crime story and too developed fantastic journey, but they are minor in comparison to original and provocative ideas enveloped in amusing and peculiar story. My rate is maximal.

After Name of Rose and Foucault's Pendulum I thought Eco is a good and interesting author, but after Island of the Day before and Baudolino, he became my favorite one.

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Summary: O Bawdy Baudolino!
Review: "Baudolino," the fourth novel of semiotician and essayist Umberto Eco, is a supremely literate, if not literary, riff on the origins of modernity, told somewhat in the style of the author's popular "The Name of the Rose." In the marshland between Milan and Genoa, Baudolino, a peasant boy with an ear for languages, is fortuitously discovered and befriended by Frederick Barbarossa, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and king of Germany and Italy. Frederick, a rapacious sort wedded to conquest and the feudal order, takes Baudolino into his confidence and becomes his adoptive father.

Over the course of the next 50 years and 450 pages, Baudolino experiences, and often singlehandedly invents, the picaresque before Marco Polo, diplomacy before Macchiavelli, poetry before Petrarch and Dante, Parisian student life, romantic love, pity, religious tolerance, the imagination of the story teller, the detective story, and the Oedipus complex, to name a few. He witnesses the growth and destruction of cities (including the author's native Alessandria), partakes of mysterious Moorish hallucinogens, tags along with the Crusaders, buys, sells, and harbors fake relics like so many junk bonds, and debates the good life and neoplatonism with dorm mates and mythological creatures alike.

Eco, for whom symbols are the ultimate reality, is fascinated by the 12th century's preoccupation with fabricated letters attributed to Prester John, a wholly imagined Christian king of the mysterious Far East. History tells us that Pope Alexander III sent his secretary in search of Prester John. The secretary was never heard of again. In Eco's novel, the letters have their genesis with Baudolino, who drafts the first of them to buttress a diplomatic maneuver of Frederick. After the mysterious death of Frederick, Baudolino, his friends, and an enemy in captivity set out without a map but with a fake Holy Grail in search of Prester John. They manage to cross the fabled river of rocks that divides Prester John's kingdom from the West and, several years later, to return. By novel's end this figment of Baudolino's imagination has morphed into a consuming obsession.

Eco is always heady and often witty, but his narrative, which tells the story of Baudolino's life virtually from cradle to grave, is monotonously straight-ahead. The telling lacks the craft of a true writer of fiction. Robert E. Olsen

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Summary: Absolutely Delightful
Review: What a refreshing delight it was to read Baudolino--quite a departure for Eco, at least in terms of tone. Whereas his other novels are rather heavy, Baudolino has such a light touch, but thankfully is not "light" reading by any stretch of the imagination. The year is 1204 and Constantinople is under siege. Baudolino rescues Niketas, a historian and over the course of several days, recounts the story of his life, freely admitting at the outset that he is a liar and has told lies all his life. The story he recounts is outrageous--exposing the relic market in the middle ages, the death of Frederick Barbarossa (Baudolino's adoptive father), the Holy Grail among other things. It begins when Baudolino is about 12 and has an encounter with Frederick, who is so taken with him that he adopts him (although both parents were still living). Baudolino goes to Paris to study and befriends the first of an amazing, amusing cast of characters that will accompany him on his journeys throughtout the novel. They seek the Holy Grail, Prester John, unicorns, all sorts of fancy. The novel is simply delightful, told with a light wit that at times reminded me of Monty Python (probably simply because of the whole Holy Grail thing). The novel is clever as well, because while it will make you smile, make you chuckle, it will also lead you to ponder about the nature of fiction versus truth in various capacities. Eco is incredibly talented; none of his novels are really like the others, but all are wonderful. This one is terrific.

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Summary: Entertaining and rich in thought
Review: I was surprised to read the disappointment in the other reviews. I felt that this book was classic Eco. It is not only an entertaining romp through a curious period of medieval history, with a would-be Forrest Gump - Baudolino, in his confabulations, would have us believe he was equally fortuitous in his own actions and encounters. Baudolino is also a philosophical discussion of truth, belief, and history. We should never expect a simple story from a professor of Semiotics, and Eco does not disappoint. As we enter a period as curious for its religious beliefs (religious relics, saints etc) as for its the peculiar necessity of reconstructing its history often out of very thin air, we are treated to a fascination meditation on how greatly belief dictates what is truth....at least for the believer. I found Baudolino entertaining and enlightening on a number of levels, which often is the defining characteristic of a truly great work.

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Summary: A Travelogue Through the Middle Ages
Review: I adored Eco's THE NAME OF THE ROSE and FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM - and hated THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE. Umberto Eco's newest novel, BAUDOLINO, lies somewhere in between. In it, Eco returns to familiar territory: the Middle Ages and the theological philosophies that shaped the times. He begins his story during the Fourth Crusade when Constantinople is under attack. A Greek priest Niketas is rescued by a mysterious man named Baudolino who amazingly knows the languages of both attackers and defenders. While the two are in hiding, Baudolino tells Niketas his life story, from his peasant beginnings to his adoption by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick to his quest to discover the kingdom of the legendary priest Prestor John. Baudolino is a self-professed liar, so his story unfolds with the authority of his voice but also with underlying uncertainty. Baudolino believes with passion many of his own lies, lending yet another layer to his tale.

Parts of this novel are brilliant, but Eco does not seem to know what he wants this novel to be. For example, he spends a portion of the book documenting the rise of the Italian city-states, finally focusing on one city and its inhabitants with convincing detail and conflict, only to discard it - just when the situation gets interesting - in favor of a lackluster quest to return the Holy Grail to Prestor John's kingdom. The books covers events that occurred throughout Europe, and somehow (is it his liar's tongue?) Baudolino is always there with his hand stirring up history. Eco devotes huge sections to war, mythological beings, and long treatises on the theological questions of the times. He seems to want to cram everything he knows about the Middle Ages into this novel: myths, misconceptions, historical figures, theological debates, politics. Unfortunately, by not building his story around one or two of these elements, he has ended up with a scattered novel that can be compelling one minute and excruciatingly dull the next. The motivations of the characters are often weak, although sometimes the characters spring up with unexpected vividness, only to fade away once again. I wish Eco had spent more time with the human moments of the Middle Ages to give this era life.

Despite the unmoored aspect to BAUDOLINO, Eco is at his humorous best when inventing, with details that made me laugh, the origin of several Middle Ages "discoveries": the shroud of Turin, the widely circulated letters of Prestor John, the conflicting relics that appeared in various early churches, to name only a few. Several real figures of the times - Zosimos the alchemist, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick and his son, and Niketas himself - have human foibles that make them rise off the page. Baudolino's relationship with both his real and his adoptive fathers are poignant in two separate scenes, and his love for his stepmother is convincingly told.

This is a sinuously told tale with no constant conflict or other driving force, but one which will please readers who love philosophy, intellectual history, and theological debates. I recommend this for patient readers who have a bonafide interest in Eco's work as well as in medieval times. You will be wholly dissatisfied if you are looking for the mystery or conspiracy of Eco's previously successful novels.

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Summary: Adventures in the Middle Ages
Review: We write the year 1204, and the Fourth Crusade is about to hit Constantinople. And there is Baudolino, youth of simple peasant stock, who is a stellar liar and linguist. This aptitude at languages brings him to the attention of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa who will keep him nearby. Barbarossa later sends him to Paris to study, and Baudolino takes up with some strange characters. But soon he has a new goal to pursue: Finding the Holy Grail and to bring it as a present to Prester John, the fabled Christian ruler over the Orient. And so our hero goes traveling from West to East, finally returning to his native village. Barbarossa has drowned in the meantime, and Baudolino tells most of his story to the Greek historian Niketas Choniates.

As usual, Mr. Eco will have his fun, and that in various languages. He guides us through long philosophical discourses and tries to pull the reader's leg now and then. One has to get joy out of this in order to call this a wonderful, intelligent book that is so very worthwhile reading.