A truly marvelous novel by one of the world's finest writers.” — The New York Daily News
“Baudolino, with its richly variegated haul of medieval treasures, remains compulsively readable.” — New York Times Book Review
“In this whimsical yet deadly earnest tale, Eco puts forth the question that perpetually beguiles him and with which he perpetually beguiles the rest of us: If a teller of tales tells us he's telling the truth, how can we know for sure what really happened?” — New Yorker
“A richly rewarding novel, as satisfying as it is stimulating. . . . This is a novel that keeps getting better, gathering irresistible force as it sweeps toward its brilliantly inevitable conclusion.” — Christian Science Monitor
The Barnes & Noble Review
Known primarily for the internationally bestselling medieval mystery The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco returns to that complex time period with a tale that's at once tremendously ambitious, scholarly, and wholly enigmatic.
In 13th-century Byzantium, the latest Crusade is underway. Its leader, Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, comes across the young Baudolino, a skillful and captivating storyteller with a gift for lies and languages that will ultimately change the course of history. Charmed by the youth, Barbarossa adopts Baudolino and sends him to the finest university in Paris, where Baudolino is mystically drawn to major world events -- among them the canonization of Charlemagne -- and manages to leave his particular personal stamp on them all. Fable that becomes reality that becomes myth is one of the many themes to be discovered in this dazzling, voluminous novel. Baudolino eventually gathers a bizarre band of followers and begins a search for Prester John, a legendary king whose lost empire in the East might hold the secrets to the Holy Grail -- and the key to a murder mystery Baudolino believes he can solve.
Eco uses the Forrest Gump-like concept of a character making an imprint on history to great effect. Stylish, weighty, and shrewd, the narrative is as much a chronicle of our world as it is the story of a fictional hero. A masterfully crafted and wonderfully erudite historical fantasy-cum-mystery, Baudolino is an impressive literary work with brilliant cross-genre appeal. (Tom Piccirilli)
The hero of this phenomenal puzzler is one Baudolino, an inveterate liar, poet, and adventurer, whose charm and wit win him the favor of Frederick Barbarossa. Seeing a brilliant counsellor in the making (which he sorely needs), Frederick adopts him and packs him off to study in Paris, where, hunkered down with his drunken and licentious cronies, Baudolino weaves a grand, shimmering tale of a priest-king called Prester John, whose extraordinary purlieu is populated by beauteous maidens and beasts of every description. True or false? Baudolino and his band set out in the middle of the Third Crusade to find out. In this whimsical yet deadly earnest tale, Eco puts forth the question that perpetually beguiles him and with which he beguiles the rest of us: If a teller of tales tells us he's telling the truth, how can we know for sure what really happened?
Sometimes faulted for lacking narrative drive, Eco flogs the hero of his new novel across the known and unknown twelfth-century world. Born poor and Italian, Baudolino is adopted by the Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Educated in bawdy Paris, Baudolino reports on sieges in Italy, falls in love with his step-mother, heads out on a crusade, sidetracks into a quest for the mythical Prester John and observes the sack of Constantinople. These adventures and Baudolino's road warrior friends exist so Eco can display the exotica of medieval Europe: arcane theological and scientific disputes between Baudolino's friends, forged relics, ingenious engines of war, monsters both real and invented, eunuchs, heretics, lepers and much more. The esoteric stuffing is often interesting, but when Baudolino leaves Europe for the purely imaginary Asia of Prester John in the last third of this latter-day romance, Eco's archival mania becomes tedious.
Brother William of Baskerville heads to an Italian abbey in The Name of the Rose. Father Caspar sails the seven seas in The Island of the Day Before. Eco's characters are forever on the move, and his new protagonist is no exception. In 1204, as Constantinople is being plucked apart by knights of the Fourth Crusade, a hapless courtier named Niketas is rescued by Baudolino - adopted son of the emperor known as Barbarossa and a man with a fantastic tale to tell. And tell it he does, to the obliging Niketas, in over 500 pages of elaborate, historically precise detail. Baudolino's journey takes him from northern Italy, where as a clever peasant boy he encounters Barbarossa and is immediately taken to court, to studies in Paris, travels throughout Italy to defend Barbarossa's cause, and finally a quest deep into the East, where he hopes to find the magical kingdom of Prester John. If you have time to sink yourself deep into the text, this can be a delicious read, but there is less of the sparkling, diamond-cut investigation of ideas that can make Eco so much fun to read, and Baudolino's backing-and-forthing can get a bit tedious. Still, Eco is ever popular, this book is getting a big push, and Baudolino's adventures should please anyone looking for the ultimate medieval road novel. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/02.] - Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
An adventurer who boasts of his proficiency as a liar unburdens his colorful history to a skeptical Greek historian during the siege of Constantinople in a.d. 1204: in this erudite and intermittently sluggish fourth novel from the philosopher-semiotician author (Foucault's Pendulum, 1989, etc.). The eponymous Baudolino, a resourceful cross between Voltaire's Candide and Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man," is a lively enough narrator who regales his exhausted hearer (one Niketas Choniates) with the story of Baudolino's agreeably misspent youth, his accidental meeting with warlord emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and the remarkable events that ensue when Frederick effectively adopts the clever stripling (possessed of "the gift of tongues") and sends him to study in Paris. Bonding with several fellow students (including a moony would-be "Poet," a love-starved half-Moor, and a pragmatic rabbinical scholar), Baudolino thereafter undertakes to compose a history of his benefactor's exploits, helps defend a defiant city created to withstand Frederick's anticipated sacking of it, and conceives a plan to locate the legendary Holy "Grasal" (a.k.a. "Grail") and make it an offering from Barbarossa to the even more legendary Prester John, the fabulously wealthy Christian King of the Orient whose "sovereignty extended over the Three Indias . . . reach . . . [ing] the most remote deserts, as far as the tower of Babel." None of this is nearly as much fun as it sounds, particularly since action is kept to a minimum while Eco permits his characters to engage in lengthy philosophical conversations-the least defensible being Baudolino's Platonic dissection of the phenomenon of love with the beautiful half-woman,half-unicorn (Hypatia) who steals his heart. The wily cupiditous monk Zosimos, whose "necromancy" complicates our hero's efforts, has a few good moments, and there are such incidental pleasures as the glimpse of Paradise reported by Baudolino's dying father Gagliaudo ("It's just like our stable, only all cleaned up"). A little learning, reputedly a dangerous thing, can be lethal when allowed to overpower a story as relentlessly as it does in Baudolino.