Baudolino

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If the palimpsest had persisted there would have been more texture, even though it would have been irritating. The book opens with Baudolino rescuing the hapless historian and Byzantine court official Niketas from the marauding knights of the Fourth Crusade during the sack of Constantinople in April 1204.

To make things even more interesting, most of Baudolino's story is narrated by himself, giving the 'unreliable narrator' trope to a whole new level. He attempts to convince the emperor's forces that Alessandria is more prepared for a siege than them through stuffing a cow with the last of Alessandria's wheat and sends the cow out to the Emperor's forces. Both this and the Name of the Rose are narratives within narratives, framed through manuscript fragments. the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and the knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may in turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopaedic. After the Emperor's death, Baudolino and his friends set off on a long journey, encompassing 15 years, to find the Kingdom of Prester John.When Liutprand is hunting in the forest near Forum, and his nephew Aufusus is accidentally injured by an arrow, the king sends to Baodolinus asking him to pray for the life of the boy. This part involves an element of secret history – the book asserts that Emperor Frederick had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while hosted at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble. 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. 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.

If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. In Paris, he gains friends (such as the Archpoet, Abdul, Robert de Boron and Kyot, the purported source of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival) and learns about the legendary kingdom of Prester John.Even when he is sent to Paris to be schooled (and to avoid his growing attraction to Frederick’s new wife, the young Empress Beatrice), his habit of generating false realities continues. 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. It is the life-history of Baudolino, a self-confessed liar, told to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates. 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. Some of the children's historical novels by Treece, Treece and Sutcliffe move us in this direction, but, of course, lack the glowing, informed, adult picture that Eco brings to the story.

The fourth novel by the prolific Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932–2016) charts the adventurous life of the eponymous hero, a medieval adventurer and consummate liar with a gift for making the most of chance. It is fiction - Eco's, Baudolino's, tall-storytellers' of the ancient world - woven into the history of the fourth crusade. 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.The earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the increasingly independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy. We can only hope that Eco goes back to the world of the adventurous medieval scholar again for his next one.