Baudolino

This took me awhile to become invested in the characters (due to plot device mostly, as it's a story about someone telling a story) but once I did I was hooked. Eco has a very clever turn of phrase and it's amusing to see all the things whose invention/creation/discovery he is attributing to his main character (I just wish I knew more medieval history cuz I'm sure I'm missing some of it). The journeys in the land of Prestor John were quite strange but very interesting. At times the Italian names began to weigh me down, but still enjoyable.

There's probably a point to this whole sprawling mess of a book, but for the life of me I didn't get it. After such undisputed masterpieces of 'The Name Of The Rose' (one of my top ten favourite books of all time) and that other one about the pendulum and the templars and stuff, you know, the one with Foucault in it, this is a bigger letdown than something that really lets you down a whole lot. I thought 'Island Of The Day Before' was just Eco's experimental diversion into forgetting how to write a decent book, but he appears to have adopted boring as a philosophy for his life, and it shows here, between the covers of this book. Nothing even *happened*. I got to the end and my girlfriend was all "Well, what happened?" and all I could do was sit there, not speaking to her, being very very quiet.

After his second novel, the Foucalt's pendulum, Eco said,arrogantly in an interview, that even he writes a trash it will become bestseller. His third novel "the island of the day before" was not as impresseive as the previous two. And Baudilino I think is a failure, though not a trash.
The name of the rose had rich material of Medieval Philosophy. It was a fantastic medieval detective novel disguised in Sharlock Holmes stories. The prohibition of Aristoteles' materialistic writings in those days was fully integrated to the novel and it was one hundred percent pertinent to the story. Foucalt's pendulum was a fantastic novel with generous knowledge about the Templars' Knights with a surprising twist at the end like the name of the rose.
But Baudilino is such a poor novel compared to these. The historical material in the book is not integrated and not really pertinent, most of the time it sticks out and artificial. He tries to connect them but the connection is not genuine. Unlike the first two novels he published, even the third one, it is a slow-paced reading without a thrill. It is a little boring.
Worst of all, there are a few historical mistakes: First I remember, Greek Nikotas (whatever his name was) tells Baudilino about the Chinese silk industry as if it is a miraculuous thing. But Greeks already had the silk industry in those years (if my memory is accurate). The city of Brusa in Byzatium especially was rich of silk industry. Second, in more than three occasions, Eco confuses the Sultanate of Seljuks in Iconium in Antolia with Seleucids which was in Anatolia long time before Seljuks-and had nothing to do with Turks and Islam-. Unfortunately, reading this book was a waste of time for me.

While reading, I want to run away from everyday life. When I was young, I loved fairy tales, myths and legends. Today I love Baudolno. This book transferes me into another world, another time where I met different people.
Eco, with his unique imagination, interweaved the life and the death of Fridrich I and the life of fictious Baudolino. Big and small historical facts, banal and bizzare details from medieval life, West and East expertly exposed with a lot of humour and irony, in a playfully connected story. Could the history be like this? Eco reveals big truth about historical truth.
Read this book to meet Baudolino and his friends whose motives are not ordinary and mundane. Characthers of this novel really cheered me up. What aims! What means! What a contrast to today's materialistic and consumeristic world.
While I was reading the book I laughed and entertained myself, but at the end I was left in dilemma. Should I laugh because history is mocked, or should I be sad because Baudolino still searches his Utopia. If you are philosophiclly minded find the answer by yourself, reading Baudolino.
I agree with some reviewers that the novel has some flaws, like unnecessary crime story and too developed fantastic journey, but they are minor in comparison to original and provocative ideas enveloped in amusing and peculiar story. My rate is maximal.
After Name of Rose and Foucault's Pendulum I thought Eco is a good and interesting author, but after Island of the Day before and Baudolino, he became my favorite one.

Baudolino is the medieval equivalent of Baron Munchausen and Don Quixote. Teller of tall tales. Prof. Eco weaves an amazing yarn that imbues medieval history (the 12th century crusade, the sacking of Byzantine, Frederick the Great's death) and the fantastic (the numerous flora and fauna of the land of Prestor John).

Absolutely mesmerizing. As with Eco's previous novels, be armed with a history encyclopaedia, it helps in understanding some of the backdrops and narratives. Relax, kick back your slippers and enjoy one of most thrilling medieval fantasy novel you will ever read.

Baudolino is a book that argues many theological issues as well as providing great climaxes incorporated into an intelligent adventure.
Baudolino begins his story in the middle ages in Italy where he has minor adventures involving ducking out of chores by lying. Caught in one of his lies, he runs into the woods where he is discovered by the Holy Roman Emperor, Fredrick Barbarossa. He has many travels with Fredrick and gains many valuable friends along the way. Unfortunately, his friends guard Fredrick's room one night and he dies. They are accused of his murder. To escape, they try to complete the age old quest of finding Prester John, an ancient bible priest. They do not find Prester John, but they find his son, a deacon living in a small town besieged by the White Horde. Baudolino raises an army of the exotic creatures in the land to fight the Horde. Because of some bad luck, they lose miserably. I would recommend this book to all people with an interest in history and those with a very high reading level. This book contained parts in Latin as well as many difficult religious concepts. I enjoyed this book, but the action was somewhat delayed. As a summary, this book was difficult, slow on action and suspense, and somewhat depressing.

I swallowed this book as the most delicious dessert - as I did with other Eco's novels. He's getting older and maybe the mind game is not that powerful as in foucault's pendulum but his craft-man-ship-ness just increases.

Baudolino is almost epic. No, it is epic. As any epic novel which imply the hero's travel there and back. But still this epic canvas is underlaid with post-modern historical (in many ways) discussions.

Viva Umberto!

First, let me say I enjoyed this book. Anyone interested in the Byzantine era would enjoy some of the details woven through the narrative.

However, as I encountered in Foucault's Pendululm, there were sections that were a bit over the top for me.

Nevertheless, it was a good page turner, and the character of Baudolino was well thought out in my opinion. Just his tale of how he got to be involved in the whole saga was well thought out...the elusive search for Prester John (and the associated twists and turns) was also very well done.

First, you have to enjoy medieval setting and mind-set to enjoy this book. It is a playful romp through the stories, legends, and mythos that formed the mindset of 1200. The sense of wonder and mystery expressed by the characters is joyous. (Imagine spending an entire evening debateing the dimensions of Solomen's castle!) Plus it examines the making of history. Sometimes, is history only a matter of who tells the better sotries and lies? All in all, great fun even if you have to work at bit.

a richly articulated and thoroughly descriptive adventure that ultimately did not hold my attention as much as the others (Rose/Pendulum/Island) did. I'm not sure if Eco simply blew me away or put me to sleep with this one. Either way, I'd rather read anything from this master before 90% of the rest of contemporary writers. What is lacking in the dynamic/excitement category is more than made up for by Eco's eloquent and powerfully written prose that proves elegant and enriching.

As others have mentioned, the protagonist of this tale comes across as a medieval Forrest Gump, someone who happens to bumble from one situation to the next with a great deal of luck, meeting Frederick Barbarossa the Emperor of Germany, surviving the sack of Constantinople, traveling all over the known world meeting various cultures, and making sense of it in a simplistic yet humorous It-is-what-it-is manner. Eco's writing style is enjoyable yet extremely interesting, like reading Don Quixote, except with a greater need for historical research seeing as how Cervantes lived in the period of his writing and Eco is looking back on it.
Although Latin pilgrims (besiegers) are rather more dangerous than windmills, we still see our hero charging into the fray, saving the helpless, telling his tale to his own Sancho Panza (Niketas).
Baudolino is crude and funny, heroic and human.
I really enjoyed this story.

This is a book for the lover of literary fiction. For one who can appreciate an alternative story for an historical event, as well as fantastical stories about faraway lands, and creatures whose faces are in their torsos. Eco is likely one of the most learned of contemporary writers and the encyclopedic historical detail he puts into his novels and non-fiction prose bears witness to this fact. In Baudolino, a self-professed liar tells the story of his life in a burning city. Raised by King Frederick; educated in France; pilgram to the kingdom of Prester John, Baudolino tells his story such that we want it all to be true. But we are sure it is not.

That's all i have to say. Enjoy.

Umberto Eco enjoys telling a thick story. Baudolino is exactly that. A pseudo-historical novel, it chronicles the life of Baudolino, a master of languages and lies. Eco tells a fantastic story, taking Baudolino from a poor peasant to searching for the mythical preacher-king Prester John. What makes Baudolino so intruiging is the aspect of the unreliable narrator. Since Baudolino the compulsive liar is telling his own story, the reader can never be sure what the truth really is. This leads to some very wild tales that complicate the story to no end. Baudolino was an extremely enjoyable novel, but requires the reader to have a little patience to weed through this dense thicket of a story.

I've recently started reading Umberto Eco's Baudolino, a rambunctious tale of a thirteenth century opportunist. "The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things."

Although I'm only 120 pages into this 500 page novel, I'm engrossed by the weaving plots and rich characters. Baudolino is an Italian peasant with a gift for languages and a bald-faced liar who is adopted by an emperor as a boy and falls in love with the emperor's young bride as a teenager. He studies at the University of Paris in its first years, and befriends a wannabe poet and a moorish scholar, and the three of them are off now on worldly quests, befuddled by alcohol and "green honey".

The thirteenth century was an influential time for so many elements of our modern society, seeing the usurpation of the church in Europe by the birth of the university, science, nationalism and capitalism, for all the good and bad that it all heralded. This book thus far does a great job of chronicling this from the perspective of someone entrenched in the middle of it all. It's great fun to compare our modern knowledge with that of a medieval persona.

I'll let you know what I think when I'm done with it, but so far, I'd highly recommend Umberto Eco's Baudolino.

Eco is astonishing! I read this in English translation, but his love of language is evident and delightful. His grasp of history is expert; really funny stuff and really sad stuff ... shows how tragedy spawns comedy.

The character Baudolino is endearing as the reader joins him on adventures from medieval trangressions to scientific endevour, to Pliny's book on the Natural World.

A rollicking book, bawdy, humorous, visual and full of enough symbolic stuff to keep any 'seeker of secret knowledge' turning the page.

I agree with Bruce Kendall. Funny review because it's so true!

Umberto Eco is probably single-handedly responsible for inspiring the academic dimension of my high school and undergraduate imagination. However, I now shun his more recent efforts. (And I even read Travels in Hyperreality and How to Travel with a Salmon!)

With Baudolino, it would seem that Eco aims not merely to illustrate the medieval world but to articulate that world through a medieval mind. The result is, sadly, next to nonsense. I had great expectations for Baudolino - set amidst the Crusades, after all!

Despite my gratitude and respect for the author of the magnificent "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum", what I learned most from "Baudolino" is the courage to stop reading a book that no longer seems interesting or relevant to me.

If you have never read Umberto Eco, I can only recommend "Rose" and "Pendulum". The hapless "Island of the Day Before" spirals on to a dull colophon that is as unsatisfying as "Baudolino". I haven't picked up "Queen Loana" but I figure I've now traded my time for other reads.

This is an entertaining read.

"Baudolino", by Umberto Eco, is a tale of grand adventure and intrigue: the setting is in Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire during the late 12th and early 13th centuries. The story is well written and absorbing: it moves at a good pace and procedes to a definitive ending. I really looked forward to finding time to keep returning to this book.

If you like Umberto Eco's style of writing then you will enjoy this book. Recommended.

This review will undoubtedly be unhelpful to most because I just can't put my finger on what it was about this book that I didn't like.

Baudolino comes of age in this novel set in the late 1100s. Born a peasant, he finds himself taken in by Frederick, the Roman Emperor. This advancement in his station in life allows him to grow up with relative wealth and travel to Paris for a formal education. It is in Paris that he meets his lifelong friends and begins a fantastical journey through history. This is a work of historical fiction that meets fantasy through Baudolino's storytelling.

Ordinarily I enjoy both historical fiction and fantasy, but this book was tedious to get through. I never really found myself enjoying the story, but rejoiced that each chapter was relatively short and I felt like I was making slow, but steady progress. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what it was about this book that I didn't like. Maybe some of the flow was lost in the English translation? Maybe the main character's ramblings were too hard to follow?

Overall it just was not enjoyable for me. Possibly dedicated history buffs will enjoy the tale but it is not for the light reader or even the reader that enjoys this genere occasionally.

Eco takes us on another journey here but its less literal than his others (or it was for me). The book is very much a parable for those searching for something (or someone) and offers not answers, but a sounding board for our own journeys through love, work, friendships, parents and life. I'm not sure if i am the only one who put the book down and felt a bit too much like Baudolino. In any case if you like Eco's style of "faction" this is a great example of his work, and easier read than his others too.

Eco's Baudolino is a wonderful story -- but what makes it worth reading is his treatment of themes that are timeless and transcend the story -- how people come to believe what they believe, the relationship between truth and fiction, between friendship, ambition, and treachery, between a leader and his advisors. He moves from chapter to chapter writing a complex medieval romance, weaving in his store of knowledge of magical creatures, medieval theology, and science, and that story is compelling. But at the same time he tells a story of the relationship of his characters to each other, and to truth, lies, and power, that rings as modern as a headline or political memoir.

This book is sort of like Forrest Gump for medievalists: your narrator's bona fides are in serious question, but if he's telling the truth (whatever THAT means), the history of the European 12th century is more or less all about him.

For those in the know, all the great political movements and hoaxes are Baudolinorian: Prester John, the Grail literature, the Courtly Love lyrics, the Third and Fourth Crusades, the politics of Frederick Barbarossa, and on and on.

If you're not really in the know about the period, this won't be much fun unless you like Googling a great deal.

The the store.com reviewer flatters this book by calling it a "giddy and exasperating romp". Giddy? No. Exasperating? Yes, and regretfully so, for I am a longtime fan of Eco's books (both academic and literary). "Baudolino" finds Eco plumbing his considerable knowledge of medieval exotic travel literature and imaginative geographies, and it reads less like a novel than like the effort of a schoolboy trying to impress his teacher with the long bibliography at the end of his essay, rather than the essay itself. The story suffers as a result. The characters are flat, lifeless, often one-note caricatures (Niketas, the man to whom Baudolino narrates his life's story, is made particularly grating by Eco's insistent mention of his love for fine food and drink). Presumably we are meant to be fascinated by Baudolino's (and, by extension, this novel's) negotiation of truth and falsity, storytelling and lying, but this negotiation, for all of its attempt to masquerade as Deep and Philosophical, comes off mostly as Dull and Ploddingly Obvious. Eco's working with magical story material here -- the Old Man of the Mountain and his assassins, Prester John's gemmed wonder of a kingdom, the court of cosmopolitan and militarily-minded Frederick II -- so it's a special pity that his own narrative is considerably far less magical. This book -- chock full of discussions of wonder -- could use a good injection of wonder itself.

Baudolino utters this remark 400 pages into this 500-page anything-but-a-quick-read. You kind of wish Eco had spared us the history and mythology surrounding Baudolino's life by mentioning this a little sooner.

This book is a chore. Some of the history is interesting, but the overriding themes about false faith and effort in vain make the reader question the task of plowing through the book.

If you're a big history buff, there might be enough in here to keep you interested. However, if you liked Eco's Name of The Rose and you're hoping this will be as good, forget it and pass this one over.

The Holy Roman Empire was a misguided attempt to resurrect a civilization that should have been left dead? In the Umberto Eco romp through semi-ancient history, he lies about Prester John and other topics much as he did in his other novels like the entirely fake Foucault's Pendulum? The Greek -Christian kingdom of Ethiopia is usually thought to be the root of the Priest John kingdom?
I see, here, Umberto Eco talking about himself as being Baudolino like?
A liar who makes up historical myths
when he knows better?
I'm not a big fan of this sort of historical distortion.

Good prose, fascinating characters, a dash of history, and a heaping of fantasy come together in this mind blowing novel recounting the lifelong quest of Baudolino, minister of Frederick Barbarossa and consummate liar.
People interested in the theology of early Christians will enjoy the last third of the book. In fact, come to think of it, some of the metaphysical musing is reminiscent of Hesse.
Overall, a great book.

It was an entertaining read. Sit back and enjoy the ride. Interesting insights into the Byzantine way of life as well as original interpretation of the various events that occured during that time. We find a Baudolino in every century, unfortunately we never get to hear his story when we read our history books.

Though I was intrigued by the novel after reading Eco's The Name of the Rose, I found the book unbearably dull. It took me about six months to finish it, just because I kept picking up other more interesting books to read. I eventually suffered through it. I have seen this book numerous times on bargains shelves in various stores, and I always have to fight the urge to complain to management about having the nerve to sell such a laborious read.

The Name of the Rose receives high marks from me. Baudolino -- not so much.

This book contains an interesting, but never really captivating story. All concepts that make this book worth reading are already present in the first third of the book. Subsequent developments are in line with the story, but I felt little value was added for most of the middle part of the book. Only in the very end, the pace picks up again into a dramatic conclusion.

If the book had been one third the size, I would have enjoyed reading it to the end. Now it just felt like a burden to complete it.

To be sure, Baudolino is as fine an adventure from a different time and place as can be found. Stacked up to Umberto Eco's other works of fiction Baudolino is the most fanciful of the group. In Baudolino Eco Lends beauty to medieval times, and tells the most truth through a most prolific liar.

This is fantastic book full of interseting elements. Young Baudolino is a magic person. Time is magic too-middle age. I recommend it to everyone, especially for people who likes fantasy. It reminds me "Narrenturm" by polish fantasy master Sapkowski.

Baudolino is an amazing tour of the 12th century, the value of lies and perception, fantastical tales, the creation of myth and legend, and the reality of language - A story of great depth and so some mischief. Absolutely brilliant.

Umberto Eco is, in my openion, almost without compare as teh literati of the historical epic. Baudolino does not compare to his other works; however, little does. Truth or dilusion . . . what is a lie, and what is reality. Bravo for Baudolino.

Baudolino is an incredibly boring book. I loved "Name of the Rose" and had high hopes for this novel, but it was a colossal disappointment. The book meanders hopelessly for 500 pages and lacks any suspense whatsoever. It took 3 attempts to actually finish the novel. The first time, I read to page 200 and desisted. I then waited 2 years and made it to page 400, but stopped reading due to shear boredom. I then waited 6-months and read the final 100 pages. I have read close to 2,000 books and this is one of the 20 most boring books I have ever encountered in my lifetime. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO READ THIS NOVEL unless your are an insomniac that requires a sleeping aid. Reading this book is the equivalent of watching paint dry or grass grow. Baudolino is boredom at its finest!