The earlier parts of the story follow the general historical and geographical outlines of 12th-century Europe, with special emphasis on the Emperor Frederick's futile efforts to subdue the increasingly independent and assertive city states of Northern Italy. Baodolinus is described there as “a man of wonderful holiness…who was distinguished for many miracles”, and as having been endowed with the gifts of clairvoyance and prophecy.

Teaming with Eco's customary metafictional games, intellectual jokes and elaborate (and even ludicrous) theological discussions, this novel is possibly his most accessible, and arguably enjoyable, since The Name of the Rose . Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine high official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. 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. In Baudolino we see the individual lost in language and isolated by the compulsion to create new versions of reality.Baudolino's personal family romance at another level is reflected in the endless theological struggles of the time about the exact relation of the Christian Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the exact nature of the flesh of the Virgin and the Son, the nature of the presence of the dead God in the blood and wine of the sacrament. Some of Kipling's stories come perhaps closest, but he never had the depth of detailed knowledge that Eco has. At one point, he falls in love with a female satyr-like creature who recounts to him the full Gnostic creation myth (Gnosticism is a pervasive presence in another of Eco's novels, Foucault's Pendulum). Both this and the Name of the Rose are narratives within narratives, framed through manuscript fragments.

It is held together by being, at one of its levels, a sustained parody of a Sherlock Holmes investigation. You see, Baudolino, an imaginary adopted son of emperor Frederick Barbarossa (who is a real historical figure, by the way), is a bit of a trickster. the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and the knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may in turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopaedic. It is a peculiar kind of novel where the difficult ideas are more interesting than the swashbuckling, or the sex, or the death, or the gruesome objects. Eco’s trademark games with language and narrative structure are just as apparent in Baudolino as they are in his previous novels, as is the humor with which he broaches these difficult ideas about history and language.Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. We can only hope that Eco goes back to the world of the adventurous medieval scholar again for his next one. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. After being embroiled in the canonisation of Charlemagne; finding the sacred remains of the Magi and helping Frederick with a siege or two, Baudolino and chums, armed with the Holy Grail, set off on a particularly monster strewn journey to find the holy Prestor John. It is a modern would-be rollicking tale, sprawling over time and place, fact and fantasy, and - apart, significantly, from its opening - it has no real voice of its own.