Baudolino (French Edition) [Paperback]

Umberto Eco (Author), Jean-Noýýl Schifano (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2002

Né dans le Piémont en 1932, titulaire de la chaire de sémiotique de l'Université de Bologne, Umberto Eco a enseigné à Paris au Collège de France ainsi qu'à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm. Il est l'auteur de nombreux essais dont Comment voyager avec un saumon et de trois romans, Le Nom de la Rose, Le Pendule de Foucault et L'île du jour d'avant. Un très grand livre... Baudolino, un jeune paysan fantasque et menteur, fait la conquête de Frédéric Barberousse et devient son fils adoptif. Baudolino fabule, invente, et, comme par miracle, tout ce qu'il imagine devient histoire. Ainsi, entre autres, il écrit la lettre mythique du Prêtre Jean, qui promettait à l'Occident un royaume fabuleux dans le lointain Orient gouverné par un roi chrétien, qui a fait rêver de nombreux voyageurs, dont Marco Polo. Baudolino grandit. Alexandrie naît vers 1168 et des années après, poussé par le génie inventif de Baudolino, Frédéric part, prenant pour prétexte une croisade, rendre au Prêtre Jean la relique la plus précieuse du christianisme, que certains appellent le Gradale. Il mourra lors de ce long voyage, dans des circonstances mystérieuses que seul Baudolino saura dévoiler. Mais son fils continuera la fabuleuse expédition vers ce royaume lointain peuplé de monstres qui ont hanté le bestiaire du Moyen Age. Il vit des aventures extraordinaires dont une histoire d'amour avec une créature des plus singulières des descendantes d'Eve... Raconté à l'historien byzantin Nicéta Coniate, tandis que Constantinople se consume après le sac, l'histoire réserve encore quelques surprises. En parlant avec Nicéta, Baudolino comprend des choses qu'il n'avait pas encore compris, d'où une fin inattendue.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 557 pages
• Publisher: Bernard Grasset, Paris (February 12, 2002)
• Language: French
• ISBN-10: 2246615011
• ISBN-13: 978-2246615019
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,915,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian novelist, medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic.

He is the author of several bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.

He has also written academic texts and children's books.


Photography (c) Università Reggio Calabria

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastical, July 7, 2008

By 

Matthew Jeray Hill (Fort Walton Beach Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Baudolino (Hardcover)

To be sure, Baudolino is as fine an adventure from a different time and place as can be found. Stacked up to Umberto Eco's other works of fiction Baudolino is the most fanciful of the group. In Baudolino Eco Lends beauty to medieval times, and tells the most truth through a most prolific liar.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!, February 27, 2011

By 

TheEngineer (San Francisco, California United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Baudolino (Hardcover)

If you are a fan of Umberto Eco, then you will know what he is capable of as a writer. Baudolino is a great novel that is a change from some of his other works. This is a very good thing. I don't think we want our favorite writers producing variations of the same novel over and over again. This is as different as "Foucault's Pendulum" is from "The Name of The Rose". Yet it is as thoroughly enjoyable and profoundly meaningful.

With a writer like Eco, there is more to his works than plot and pacing or characters. Ideas are central and there is no shortage of them in this work. The writing itself is also a joy to read.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Baudolino the Opportunist, September 28, 2005

By 

Aaron Winborn "AaronWinborn.com" (Harrisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baudolino (Hardcover)

I've recently started reading Umberto Eco's Baudolino, a rambunctious tale of a thirteenth century opportunist. "The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things."

Although I'm only 120 pages into this 500 page novel, I'm engrossed by the weaving plots and rich characters. Baudolino is an Italian peasant with a gift for languages and a bald-faced liar who is adopted by an emperor as a boy and falls in love with the emperor's young bride as a teenager. He studies at the University of Paris in its first years, and befriends a wannabe poet and a moorish scholar, and the three of them are off now on worldly quests, befuddled by alcohol and "green honey".

The thirteenth century was an influential time for so many elements of our modern society, seeing the usurpation of the church in Europe by the birth of the university, science, nationalism and capitalism, for all the good and bad that it all heralded. This book thus far does a great job of chronicling this from the perspective of someone entrenched in the middle of it all. It's great fun to compare our modern knowledge with that of a medieval persona.

I'll let you know what I think when I'm done with it, but so far, I'd highly recommend Umberto Eco's Baudolino.