Baudolino

A true story of a real fake: In the 12th century, as Europe began to feel anxiety over the long-term success of the Crusades, a widespread legend concerned a perfect Christian kingdom in the East ruled by a high priest and king named Prester John. A letter first delivered in Constantinople—apparently the work of a medieval antecedent of Jackass' Johnny Knoxville—lent credence to the legend. Attributed to John himself, it described a pious land of great military strength and numerous fantastical creatures. In Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino, this and many other tales can be traced to the eponymous hero, a cunning Italian peasant taken under the wing of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In a book that's part confession, part shaggy-dog story, Baudolino recounts his life to the Byzantine court official and historian Niketas Choniates (one of the novel's many historical figures), as Constantinople falls during the Fourth Crusade, when the might of Europe shifted its attentions from reclaiming the Holy Land to taking down Christian rivals in the East. A self-proclaimed liar, Baudolino is an unreliable narrator, to say the least. As the novel progresses, he shifts from taking credit for creating the kingdom of Prester John to heading off in search of it himself. This turn allows Eco to once again bring his work as a scholar of semiotics and medieval thought into play, skillfully evoking a world that could entertain the contradiction of a man questing after a myth he created. Just as clues to a mystery stood in for everyday methods of reading the world in The Name Of The Rose and a collection of crackpot theories conspired to manifest in Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino explores the ways stories and objects can be both fabricated and true, and the fine (or even nonexistent) line that separates belief in a thing and the existence of the thing itself. Fortunately, the novel balances playfulness with headiness. For Eco, the way an ordinary cup can become the Holy Grail serves as a profound stand-in for how meaning is created, but it also works as a funny gag. Eco's first full return to the medieval era since The Name Of The Rose, Baudolino reveals that he hasn't developed much as a novelist since then. Filled with flat characters and a plot that's shapeless until it's rushing to a breathless finale, the book is slack but entertaining, and only Eco's collection of interests could have created it. A famous medieval map of the world hangs in the Hereford Cathedral, offering a roughly accurate view of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, then filling in the blanks with the stuff of legend, allowing the limits of knowledge to form the threshold of the imagination. As a tour guide of that map's world, Eco has few rivals.

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