Baudolino

De: Umberto Eco, William Weaver - Translator - translator

Narrado por: George Guidall

The author of the international sensation The Name of the Rose returns to the Middle Ages in this beguiling tale of history, myth, and invention.

It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts—a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. When still a boy, he meets a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind.

The commander—who proves to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa—adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends.

Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a legendary priest-king said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East—a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens.

With dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age, this is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.

“Baudolino, with its richly variegated haul of medieval treasures, remains compulsively readable.”—The New York Times Book Review(P)2002 Recorded Books

A Whimsical Adventure of the Highest Caliber

Eco knocks it out of the park again with Baudolino. Superb writing, interesting characters, deep historical and mythological details. The performance here was perfect. A must listen (and then read!).

10/10

a medieval history nerd's delight. Eco writes great s*x scenes and the dialogue is believable.

Great reader and and interesting story

Umberto Eco books are always convoluted and tricky and this book is no exception. I enjoyed the story but the reading was first rate. This probably the best reading I have heard out of the 10+ books I have listened to. He enlivened a story that dragged a little at times. I'm sorry it's over.

wonderful

Umberto Eco delivers in a wonderful snd strange story on merging realities and old myths. excellently narrated

For Umberto Eco fans, very good but not great

I'm a fan of Umberto Eco novels. I definitely enjoyed this one, too. But I do find that the quality of his novels is mixed - there are some that are superb, some that are merely good, but don't live up to the expectations, and there are those that fall somewhere in between. Baudolino falls somewhere in between. I would say that it is the middle third that kind of drags down the total enjoyment of the book. Eco combines historical background and historical characters with fantasy and historically popular fantasy. So we find the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Frederick I and other historical events or characters, legends like those of Prester John, and fantastical conversions of historical characters like Hypatia, all woven together into a story of adventure, love, mystery, and fantasy. The leading characters are wonderfully developed, the human relationships and the problems with relationships and friendships are presented as the complexities that they are. There are moving portions, and the last chapters are a wonderful closing to this story. But the middle third - the journey to find the kingdom of Prester John, in which Baudolino and his comrades come upon all sorts of mythical creatures (and though I didn't check all of them, it appears that Eco did not make up most of these mythical creatures himself, but brilliantly brought them all into his fantasy) - tends to drag. I felt like, OK, we know that it won't end here, in this land with these weird creatures, I get the idea, let's move on with the story. But when it did move on, the total pleasure returned. It helps to know some Christian history, to appreciate the sectarian disputes (at some points I felt like this book is a fantastical version of Diarmaid MacCulloch's "A History of Christianity", and I was loving the connections I could make between the fiction and the history book). And, of course, the presentation of the world of Christian relics can be added to Mark Twain's comments on such relics in Innocents Abroad. But Eco is. More subtle in some ways because he gives some insight into the the thinking of people in such matters. Like all Eco books, to truly appreciate them you need to have some familiarity with the material that he uses to build his stories.
The narrator was excellent.
Overall, I'd recommend this book, but if you are not yet an Eco fan, don't start with this book. Start with The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Prague Cemetery (which is really only for people who will get the satire).