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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 .
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.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. Philosophical debates are mixed with comedy, epic adventure and creatures drawn from medieval bestiaries. The book opens with Baudolino rescuing the hapless historian and Byzantine court official Niketas from the marauding knights of the Fourth Crusade during the sack of Constantinople in April 1204.
It is the life-history of Baudolino, a self-confessed liar, told to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates. 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. The 'modern classics' label hadn't really made me want to get into his works, somehow making them seem even more stuffy and dreary than authors filed under 'classics'.Born in 1137, in what later becomes the city of Alessandria, a chance childhood encounter with Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Great rescues Baudolino from his impoverished environment.
It is an examination of the deep need for explanatory stories - myths, fables, chronicles, family traditions, science - and works in codes and layers that resemble the medieval methods of biblical interpretation as much as modern semiotics. We can only hope that Eco goes back to the world of the adventurous medieval scholar again for his next one.
Some of Kipling's stories come perhaps closest, but he never had the depth of detailed knowledge that Eco has.
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