Customer Reviews

Baudolino

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Though I was intrigued by the novel after reading Eco's The Name of the Rose, I found the book unbearably dull. It took me about six months to finish it, just because I kept picking up other more interesting books to read. I eventually suffered through it. I have seen this book numerous times on bargains shelves in various stores, and I always have to fight the urge to complain to management about having the nerve to sell such a laborious read.
The Name of the Rose receives high marks from me. Baudolino -- not so much.

2.5-3 stars

Baudolino is a clever look at how religious mythology starts and convinces those who invent it in the first place.
However, it just dragged on and on and became extremely repetitive in the sense that Eco got his point across in the first couple hundred pages. He didn't need to keep hammering it home, 'adventure' after 'adventure'. A much condensed version would have been rated much higher.

I felt I had to finish this book for some reason but kept picking up others in the meantime. In all I think it took 9 months to get through. This is my first Eco book (I also have The Name of the Rose on the shelf) and I wonder if they all have this problem.

You can tell by this book that Eco really knows his medieval lore, but the long rambling descriptions become tiresome about halfway through. The only other Eco book I have read was "The Name of the Rose" which I enjoyed immensely. I was hoping that this book would be as gripping but instead I found the plot to be convoluted and occasionally the story veered off into sub plots that seemed to have no bearing on the actual story. I found myself skimming over big sections near the end in an attempt to get to the conclusion. After I finally finished this book, I wished I had put it down a lot sooner and just started on something that was actually worth my time.

I tried to read this book. I really tried. I got it on sale because I'd heard of the author and was curious. This is the first book in my memory that I have put aside because I hated every sentence in it. Normally I struggle through the first part of a "boring" book and become pleasantly surprised by the end. I just couldn't get past the first fifty pages, and not without lack of effort. The sad part is that I wanted to like this book and made an honest effort to, but the author made that impossible for me. My advice is don't read this one - there are better books out there. Who knows, in a few years I may even be willing to try one of Eco's earlier works. Then again, I hate this book so much that I doubt I'll even be willing to concede to that. If you like "historical" fiction, try Carter Beats the Devil or the Venus Throw, which are a lot more fun to read.