Baudolino

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Forty years later, during his career as a stylite near Byzantium, Eco has his hero perform a miracle of clairvoyance modelled closely on that of the saint. 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. It is the life-history of Baudolino, a self-confessed liar, told to the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates.

Niketas Choniates helps Baudolino discover the truth about how the Emperor Frederick died – with shattering results for Baudolino and his friends. It is April, 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. 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'. To make things even more interesting, most of Baudolino's story is narrated by himself, giving the 'unreliable narrator' trope to a whole new level.His story begins in 1155, when Baudolino – a highly talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to and adopted by the emperor Frederick I. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. 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?

Niketas is amazed by his language genius, speaking many languages he has never heard, and Baudolino begins to recount his life story to Niketas. The death of Frederick Barbarossa is presented as a classic "sealed room" mystery, from the modern detective story, in which the emperor might have been killed by any number of ingenious devices, including a vacuum-making machine. 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. In Baudolino, Eco has created a worthy literary rival to Frasers' 'Flashman' and, like Flashman, Baudolino inadvertently becomes embroiled in great events of his own accidental making. Having read a loved Eco's The Name of the Rose, I bought this as a Christmas present for a friend who's into medieval history and literature.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. He is first mentioned in the Historia Langobardorum (English: History of the Lombards) which was written some forty years after his death by Paul the Deacon. Both this and the Name of the Rose are narratives within narratives, framed through manuscript fragments. 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.