Baudolino: A Novel

Umberto Eco

Oct 2003 · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About this ebook

A self-confessed liar spins a fascinating tale of his life in this “comic and brilliantly baffling” historical novel by the author of The Name of the Rose (The Guardian, UK).
 
Constantinople, 1204. The Byzantine capital is under siege by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors—and proceeds to regale him with the fantastical story of his life.
 
Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts: a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. As a boy he meets a foreign commander who adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, they decide to go in search of the legendary priest-king Prester John who is said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East.
 
The kingdom they seek is a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs; of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens. With dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age, Baudolino is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.

Ratings and reviews

“Baudolino” is a fanciful and mythical novel by Umberto Eco, set in the twelfth century Europe and the Near East. Eco, best known for his masterwork “The Name of the Rose,” returns with “Baudolino” to the theme medieval Europe, albeit of somewhat earlier date. The eponymous protagonist of this novel finds himself adopted by an accident by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, which sets him on the path of high adventure. During Baudolino’s years of study in Paris, he befriends a motely crew of thinkers, poets, and adventurers, and with their help conjures a plan to discover the land of mythical Prester John, who supposedly lives somewhere far in the East. Most of the second half of the novel concerns the journey of Baudolino and his companions. Most of the stories in here are told from the Baudolino’s perspective, as he narrates them to Niketas Choniates, a famous twelfth century Byzantine historian, whose life he had saved during the sacking of Constantinople. Frederick I and Niketas Choniates are just a couple of actual historical characters who appear in “Baudolino” under very unusual and highly fabricated circumstances. Eco knows his history very well, and is able to push the plausibility into the lacunae of our knowledge and fill them up with fanciful interconnected narrative. In the latter part of the book, though, he almost completely abandons any appeal to realism, and takes the reader on a wild ride through some of the most fantastic and imaginative scenes taken from the medieval myth and lore. Both readers and the literary critics have not in general been impressed by any of the Eco’s fictional works, with the notable exception of the “Name of the Rose.” That book had propelled Eco well into the stratosphere of modern literary celebrities, and he’s been able to capitalize on that reputation for the better part of the last three decades. Unfortunately, “Baudolino” does nothing to repair the generally low impression that Eco’s later novels had left. Despite the dazzling displays of erudition and mastery of medieval history and lore, the novel doesn’t have a sense of unified and coherent narrative. The characters are very colorful, but they lack the depth of emotion and are not very convincing as actual flash and blood individuals. It’s almost as if Eco had tried to develop every character around a particular idea. This can sometimes work in a short story, but in order for the reader to care about them over the course of a long novel, they needed to poses a lot more verisimilitude to the actual human beings. Parts of the novel are intended as a tongue-in-cheek criticism and lampooning of the medieval inter-Christian controversies and disputes. This in itself has some appeal, and it leads to some of the funnier situations and scenes in the book, but even here Eco manages to go overboard and overwork his points. Overall, “Baudolino” is an interesting exercise in adapting comedia dell’arte for the modern audience, but unfortunately it is too overwrought and overstylized for it to be either amusing or engrossingly thought provoking. It’s still an interesting enough novel, and if you are into the medieval history then you’ll find a lot of curious and fascinating material in it.

This is the best of Eco. Joyful, whimsical and brilliant. A pleasure to read and educational in a way that allows one to research or calculate the truthfulness of many statements. The main character is a liar, though a lovable one. Great story, great mind games.

Still worth the read.

About the author

UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and seven novels, including The Name of the Rose,The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega, was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.