Baudolino

Product Information

His collections of essays also include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays. 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.

You see, Baudolino, an imaginary adopted son of emperor Frederick Barbarossa (who is a real historical figure, by the way), is a bit of a trickster.Eco uses this focus on lies and lying to interrogate our understanding of history, presenting it as a collective illusion that is constructed to fit the demands of the present rather than the events of the past. Eco’s trademark games with language and narrative structure are just as apparent in Baudolino as they are in his previous novels, as is the humor with which he broaches these difficult ideas about history and language.

Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. 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.

In 1174, according to tradition, he appeared on the bastions of the city and put to flight the Imperial troops who were besieging the city.

Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again.

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. 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. If the palimpsest had persisted there would have been more texture, even though it would have been irritating.

From the moment when they depart eastwards, the book becomes pure fantasy – the lands which the band travels bearing no resemblance to the continent of Asia at that or any other historical time, being rather derived from the various myths which Europeans had about Asia – including the aforementioned Christian myth of the Kingdom of Prester John, as well as the Jewish myth of the Ten Lost Tribes and the River Sambation, and some earlier accounts provided by Herodotos. His story begins in 1155, when Baudolino – a highly talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to and adopted by the emperor Frederick I.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.