Customer Reviews

Balthasar's Odyssey: A Novel

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have to confess that I did not expect to enjoy Balthasar's Odyssey. I had chosen it on the strength of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and it was only after I bought it that I became aware of the mixed reviews and the unhappy readers.

I am pleased to say that in the end I enjoyed it quite a bit. Far from discouraging me in reading further in the Maalouf novels, it has encouraged me to think that I will enjoy the rest of his work. I will be picking up Samarkand next, I think.

The key to enjoying Balthasar's Odyssey is in having the proper expectations before you read the book. Based on my two-book selection I will say that Maalouf writes history like a novelist, and novels like a historian.

I can understand why so many readers were irritated. Maalouf does not tie up his loose ends. Unexplained motivations remain unexplained. Things are lost and never found again. Conversations remain unfinished and characters disappear, never to reemerge. If you are looking for a plot in a restorative Hollywood sense, you will not find it in this book.

What Balthasar's Odyssey is about, fundamentally, is communication. Balthasar is a Levantine seller of books and antiquities. His family came to the Levant from Genoa, and are famous for being foreigners-- "the last Genoese to come to this part of the world." The quest for the book "The Hundredth Name" takes him on an amazing journey to Constantinople, the Mediterranean, London and France-- all in the aid of finding an answer to a question that he is not even sure needs answering.

Along the way, he meets people from all over the world. He travels with a mysterious Persian prince, becomes close to a woman in London just prior to the great fire, flees through France with an Austrian emigrant, and finally has to come to terms with his "own"-- Genoese families who know him by family name rather than in person.

The trip and its goal are largely incidental. The beauty of this book are in the moments of communication that Balthasar is able to find with his fellow travellers. If you set those conversations and efforts at cultural understanding against the backdrop of 1666 (the year of the beast), you have a complex and quietly cutting commentary that just as easily applies to our own time as it does to history.

The translation seemed largely very good (aside from a tendancy to over-use exclamation points) and Maalouf is a very good writer. The journal form works well for the subject, but does take a little bit of persistence on the part of the reader in the beginning.

I would recommend Balthasar's Odyssey to people who like intelligent historical literary fiction. It will probably appeal more to people who like Pamuk than it will to fans of Eco. A potential readers should be comfortable with non-traditional plotting and not be expecting too much in the way of resolution.

After having read nearly all of Maalouf's books, this is one of his best. (Samarkand remains my favorite.) Odyssey is an appropriate word in the title. The protaganist makes a journey and quest with real philosophical issues. This is a Candide story, with skepticism. It is hard to put the book down at night when reading. Balthasar faces many challenges both in his quest for the book, and in love, but also about life. The reader feels for his concerns. One of the nice details is that whenever he came to a town/city he looked for and visited the local booksellers, this was in 1666. His companions on his journey help him struggle with issues. This is a book about fate and life and well worth reading.

For readers expecting Mediterranean adventures, intertwined with religiously related stories, look no further. This is a story of a Genoese book trader called Balthasar Embriaco or Baldassarro Embriaco who lived near a southwestern part of Mediterranea.

Christianity, Islam and Judaism were part of the everyday life in this plot set sometime between 1665-1667. The year 1666 was supposedly to be the year of the Beast. But don't expect anything as unconventional as the Da Vinci's Code by Dan Brown.

This novel was written in a diary style, which the "author", Balthasar, put his daily experiences and thoughts into his dairies. In fact "he" wrote four diaries during the span of this novel.

Summing it up: a romantic novel with a Mediteranean background, which the author exploited quite well, and voyages to London, Lisbon, Paris and other Mediterranean European countries. Mr. Maalouf has done an extremely detailed research prior to publishing it.

I enjoyed this book very much, though not the best novel I have read. Thus, a four star.

This is my very first Maalouf reading. I got interested through a bookstore website which had paragraphs in Spanish of his books. It is dense to read; but absolutely enjoyable. Baltassar is a very elegant distinguished and educated man in 1666. The English translation is very complete; I loved the words; even good to read aloud. It gives a very nice picture of the era and the places; very descriptive and full of adventures of course!
Very nice; Looking forward reading more Maalouf's fiction.

The year 1666 approaches and the Christian world is concerned that the world is about to end. Enter Balthasar Embriacio, an Italian bookseller in the Levant, discovers a copy of a book that contains the 100th name of God: whoever learns this name, according to the Koran, would become immortal, thus survive the coming apocalypse. Unfortunately, Balthasar sells the book before he realizes what he has, and the ensuing quest about Europe in search of this treasure becomes the gist of this imaginative novel. Maalouf, a Lebanese author and winner of France's Prix Goncourt in 1993, succeeds in both his 17th century atmosphere and in the engaging, sympathetic character of Balthasar.

In Islam there are 99 names for God, but I do vaguely recall my Islamic Education teacher mentioning that there was indeed a hundredth name to God. It was only revealed to one of the prophets. And if my memory serves me correctly, to know the 100th name is to ensure one's salvation. That, with the fact that Maalouf is the author left me tingling with excitement until I flipped the hardcover to start reading.
Page 1: Wasting no time for the GRIP, Maalouf offers his set-up: "That strange book, appearing and disappearing, and all my fault. Old Idriss's death. And the journey I'm to set out on next Monday, despite my qualms." This is the story in summary.

In this tale of magic and mystery, of love and danger, the narrator Balthasar's ultimate quest is to find the secret that could save the world. Before the dawn of the apocalyptic 'Year of the Beast' in 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese Levantine merchant, sets out on an adventure with his two nephews - the scholarly Jaber who revels in arcane literature "as if in the most delicious sweetmeats" and the womanising Habib - and the "wilful" Marta. Together this group of misadventurers travel, across the breadth of the civilized world, from Constantinople, through the Mediterranean, to London shortly before the Great Fire. Balthasar's urgent quest is to track down that copy of one of the rarest and most coveted books ever printed, Abu-Maher al-Mazandarani's The Unveiling of the Hidden Name' or called 'The Hundredth Name', its contents are thought to be of vital importance to the future of the world.
Though a religious sceptic, Balthasar finds the mounting hysteria over the predicted end of the world bewildering. But he is haunted by the book and what it contains.
Desire to uncover another truth, one which will define his future, also pushes him on: is his beloved Marta, long ago deserted by her feckless husband, truly a widow now, or simply a callously discarded wife?

Indeed, the past in the book - all of Maalouf's undoubted research and travail - sometimes seems like little more than a pretext for the very huggable Balthasar, "the size of a buffalo", to knock around the world, gaining experience and falling in love with people and places. You get the feeling, almost, that Balthasar could have been born at any time, and have any kind of adventure: Constantinople could be anywhere here or there; 1666 could be now, or tomorrow. Which probably makes Balthasar an Everyman.
Definitely a good read!!

Maalouf (probably one of the most popular writers in the Middle East from Egypt to Turkey) gives us another of his historical novels.

Set in a time when many thought the end of the world was iminent (something like at the start of the year 2000) The story surrounds a Lebanese bookseller who goes out in search of a mysterious book that contains the '100th name' (based upon God having 99 names and attributes known to man) This myserious 100th name is a name hidden from man.

He travels to Turkey to witness the movement of Sabbetai Sevi whose followers would later be known in Turkey as the 'Donme' then on to Europe where he witnessed the great fire of London.

While some may be critical of some of the historical detial in the novel (the strange Muslim sect for example dont seem to have any historical base) he is mostly praised for bringing history to life and this book is no exception. The lives of the people of the time are wonderfully brought to life something no history book could do.

Probably a book for the airport while waiting for that flight or sitting on a plane with nothing more than a 9 hour journey to look forward to.

Decent read, you will probablyl have it finished in a day, 2 at best but still worth a read.

This book has a very interesting premise and time setting. It follows the hero - a logical, skeptical, intelligent person - through a journey in search of a mysterious book which is supposed to contain the 100th name of God, which would grant the person who knows it special knowledge. Set during a year (1666) in which many people were expecting the end of the world, it confronts the hero, who rationally does not want to believe any of it, with various unexplicable signs which seem only to confirm the rumors. He also meets several people of varied backgrounds, some who believe, some who do not believe. He is constantly torn between his rationality and his emerging superstitions, and slowly falls towards believing himself in the end of the world. His thoughts and the way they evolve are very interesting, we see the change through the eyes of a rational man, who does not want to belive in sings but is forced to. His conversations with others confront ideas and principles and are, for the most part, very well and realistically done.

There were also some interesting descriptions about the way of life in the time period.

But... after a while, the novel starts to lose focus. Baldassare meets and takes along in the journey a woman he had loved when he was young, Martha. Slowly, they grow closer and eventually become lovers. Sadly, since the novel is written in the form of a journal, we do not see Martha's point of view in all this, and thus I did not understand why she fell in love with him. I did not even understand how and why Baldassare fell in love with her. He only tells us what happens between them and how he reacts, but rarely writes how he *feels* about her. The narration is very cold on this point.

The worst part, though, was that the book he was seeking loses importance in the end. It was the center of the plot, and then it is just left unexplained.

At several points through the story, the novel has a "peak" in terms of suspense, of intensity, but then just falls flat and starts all over again, and you feel that you have lost something along the way. Characters which had been important disappear and we never learn their fate. Martha's final decision is also not explained.

He does not justify or explain his changes of heart regarding the women in his life, not once in the whole book, to this reader's satisfaction. Eventually, he comes across as a really undecided character who succumbs readily to what others expect of him, and this totally contradicts the firmness of decision and the rationality he displayed in the first part of the book. He was presented as a man who knows what he wants in life, who makes his own decisions rationally, and in the end he just "goes with the flow" of fate.

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

In the journey, he and Martha get separated and eventually he becomes the lover of another woman. This change of heart was completely unplausible. He still thinks about Martha, he wants to get back to her, but betrays her. And, it gets worse. In the end of the book he is supposed to marry a 15 years old girl, who is 25 years younger than him. I know things were different in the XVII century, but still... Some reasons *are* given, but earlier in the story, presented with the same arguments and facts, Baldassare had taken a different decision.

Well, this is a lenghty review, and I fear it is falling towards the same mistake as the book, losing focus. It was not a bad book, but did not live up to my expectations.

Excellent! This is the third book I have read written by Mr. Maalouf and still he hasn't disappointed me. Being able to adapt a simple story to such an incredible novel is fascinating. The way he describes all the places Balthasar visits makes the book very interesting especially because it is never easy to imagine certain things a books says about a story that took place a long time ago. Doesn't interest me to write about what the book is about; I am only interested on saying that this book is excellent.

One of his best books.... and a joy to read. You feel as if you are part of his caravan or sitting next to him on a boat. Highly recommended.