Review by Booklist Review
The challenges and joys of this Italian professor's internationally best-selling Name of the Rose (1983) indicated that literary and popular are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms. Eco's latest novel continues to support the concept. In keeping with his customary practice, Eco sets his story in the past--in this case, twelfth-century Europe and the Near East. A man named Baudolino, of northern Italian peasant stock, finds himself in Constantinople as the Crusaders are sacking the Byzantine capital. He tells his life story to a court official whose life he has saved, and what a story it is. As a youngster, he was adopted by the great Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Baudolino not only received his University of Paris education at the emperor's behest but also learned the geographical, cultural, and political dimensions of a much wider world than he could have ever known on his own as he accompanied Frederick on the emperor's exploits in maintaining the security of his realm. But for years Baudolino's dream was to travel east to visit the mythological domain of Prester John, a legendary priest and king. Eco's novel is dreamlike itself. He weaves with deeply colored threads a fantastical narrative that beautifully mixes the elements of an adventure story with intellectual discussions of theology, government, language, geography, and politics. The most provocative aspect of the tale, however, is the overarching question it poses about truth versus imagination in the act of recording history. This is historical fiction at its best: smart, enrapturing, and authentic. --Brad Hooper
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers admire Eco the semiotician, but they love Eco the novelist. Here, he returns to his old stomping ground the Middle Ages to relate the story of a quest for a priceless relic that is prompted by an imaginary map. This book is not currently available in English. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. First printing of 400,000; $400,000 ad/promo; author tour
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
