Baudolino

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He talks a kind of rushed slapstick - he sounds like a popular historical romance of, perhaps, the 1950s - and his author's control of the pace and tension of his narrative is much less secure than it was in The Name of the Rose. Even so, Baudolino is one of the most mysterious of Eco’s characters, a man whose past and sense of self are constantly being remade by his own imagination, and who no longer knows where his own lies end and reality begin. c. 740) was a hermit who lived at the time of the Lombard king Liutprand in Forum Fulvii (now Villa del Foro), a locality on the lower reaches of the river Tanaro in north-west Italy.

Here, in this set-piece, is a clue to why this novel is not, as a novel, anywhere near as successful as The Name of the Rose.

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. They have no voice of their own and remain flat and two-dimensional, not fully imagined, nor yet distanced, hinted and layered. 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. I'm glad I've reconsidered, because while Baudolino is full of historical minutae and almost menacingly erudite at times, it also brims with wit, passion, irony and imagination.

With the closure of the church in 1803, Baudolino's remains were transferred to the church of Sant'Alessandro and then in 1810 to a chapel dedicated to him in the new cathedral. One day, when still a boy, he met a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind.My experience of Umberto Eco has been mixed - loved 'Name of the Rose', hated ' Island of the Day Before'. The marvels of Prester John's realm are not quite Rider Haggard, nor yet a parody of Rider Haggard, nor yet a parody of Mandeville. This delight in character, story, temperament, culture, context and language comes across just as clearly in Baudolino as it did in the earlier book. 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.

Teaming with Eco's customary metafictional games, intellectual jokes and elaborate (and even ludicrous) theological discussions, this novel is possibly his most accessible, and arguably enjoyable, since The Name of the Rose .Four centuries later, in 1168, Alessandria was founded as a bastion of the Lombard League against the Holy Roman Empire. There's just one other thing that marks Eco out as being not only master of this genre but also of others. He falls in love - in the classical situation of chaste courtly love and distant desire - with Barbarossa's wife, Beatrice of Burgundy, a kind of passion that thrives on fantasy and invention. Nature abhors a vacuum" and things rush into the emptiness of created vacua, both in the flask and in the mind. 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.

So beneath the entertaining exotica of Baudolino’s narrative lies Eco’s real interest: How do we narrate the past when language itself becomes untrustworthy?The family romance extends itself into the romance of travel, the romance of legend, and the romance of desire. Niketas Choniates helps Baudolino discover the truth about how the Emperor Frederick died – with shattering results for Baudolino and his friends. We can only hope that Eco goes back to the world of the adventurous medieval scholar again for his next one.