Baudolino

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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. 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 we see the individual lost in language and isolated by the compulsion to create new versions of reality. The 'modern classics' label hadn't really made me want to get into his works, somehow making them seem even more stuffy and dreary than authors filed under 'classics'.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. It is the life-history of Baudolino, a self-confessed liar, told to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates. Eco's new novel, set during the sack of Constantinople in 1204, derives from Boccaccio its form of stories told during a crisis, but has things in common also with the fabulating fantasy of Calvino's Imaginary Cities. In the year of 1204, Baudolino of Alessandria enters Constantinople, unaware of the Fourth Crusade that has thrown the city into chaos. Baudolino is a forger of fictions - his love poems resemble Cyrano, he makes up a letter from the legendary Prester John, ruler of a fabulous faraway land, and devises imaginary maps of the known or speculative world.

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.During the siege, Baudolino works on the side of Frederick Barbarossa, but concocts a plan to help win the Alessandrian townspeople independence. It is a paradox that Eco's most readable tale is also his least satisfactory - an insubstantial body, informed by the ghost of a brilliant idea. 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. The family romance extends itself into the romance of travel, the romance of legend, and the romance of desire.

Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The young Baudolino’s desire to construct his own version of reality is to become a recurring theme in the novel, for when his theft of Otto’s manuscripts appears to be on the brink of discovery, Baudolino simply forges new ones from his own imagination. 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. 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.He is the patron saint of the nearby city of Alessandria, where his feast is celebrated on the Sunday following 10 November. 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.