Baudolino

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At court and on the battlefield, he is educated in reading and writing Latin and learns about the power struggles and battles of northern Italy at the time.

Sent to Paris to learn "the art of saying well that which may or may not be true" Baudolino fell in with a band of good fellows and fell in love with his stepmother. Despite being a slab of a novel it never becomes a slog nor outstays its welcome, leaving you with a nice double plot twist and possibly the best ending line ever written as parting gifts. The family romance extends itself into the romance of travel, the romance of legend, and the romance of desire. He's a cunning and imaginitive fabricator of religious mysteries, yes, but he soon discovers that the world is inhabited by liars far more cruel and accomplished than he.Amid the carnage and confusion 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. They have no voice of their own and remain flat and two-dimensional, not fully imagined, nor yet distanced, hinted and layered. After a brief foray into Baudolino's youthful attempts at autobiography, the novel opens in Constantinople in 1204, at the time of the Fourth Crusade.

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.The earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the increasingly independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy. They meet imaginary beasts and monsters - giants and creatures with eyes in their breasts, one-footed hopping skiapods and beautiful hypatias, half-virgin, half-goat - creatures out of the fantastic voyages of Mandeville, turned solid in this tale. As always with Eco, this abundant novel includes dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, pages of extraordinary feeling and poetry, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age. This combination of palimpsest and mixed colloquial Latin, Italian, German and other languages does give Baudolino a substantiality and a knottiness which he loses when he simply starts talking.

There's just one other thing that marks Eco out as being not only master of this genre but also of others. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.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.

Baudolino has helped Niketas Choniates, the chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, to flee the city.During the siege, Baudolino works on the side of Frederick Barbarossa, but concocts a plan to help win the Alessandrian townspeople independence.