Umberto Eco: Baudolino

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Anyone else read this one? I finally finished it off today and I have to say I enjoyed it much more than Island of the Day Before and actually more than Foucault's Pendulum, although in a sort of different way. Baudolino is downright goofy at times, in a very endearing and engaging way - in filling the narrative with tall tales and liar puzzles Eco ends up with the most sympathetic protagonist I've seen from him...though I haven't yet gotten around to The Name of the Rose. Like Island it's based around the misconceptions of an earlier time, but where that book made a sort of tragic mockery out of the guy who thought he could travel through time by crossing the international date line, Baudolino's world is so thoroughly realized that the quest for the kingdom of Prester John seems noble rather than ridiculous. Of course, the flipside of being a briskly entertaining and colorful novel is the charge of being lightweight - so, is there more going on in here besides an Oz/Sindbad picaresque? Discuss amongst yourselves.

― Doctor Casino (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 31 October 2006 04:47 (nineteen years ago)

I read it about a month ago. Eco's nonfiction are among my favorite books, specifically 'Kant and the Platypus'. I found Baudolino to be entertaining, but the 'unreliable narrator' trope wears a bit thin by the end. FP and Rose are sentimental favorites, and it took me three tries to get through Island, but I would still rate it a better effort than Baudolino. Eco is excellent at staying in character, and his narrators, to my sensibilities, are unerringly 'of their time', but I, for one, did have much sympathy for B. You've read enough Eco now, doc, to read the Rose, but do not overlook 'Kant and the Platypus', it's mindblowing.

― Docpacey (docpacey), Tuesday, 31 October 2006 05:56 (nineteen years ago)

Somehow the unreliable narrator didn't wear out for me, maybe because he'd somehow gotten it to a point where he wasn't unreliable anymore, where within the book's world it might as well be reliable since you weren't going to get any other information and there wasn't too much that was internally inconsistent. If he sheds tears about someone dying at the hands of a manticore, then manticores have to be in some way real for him, right? I like the book's rubberband reality that way...

― Doctor Casino (Doctor Casino), Tuesday, 31 October 2006 06:20 (nineteen years ago)

I got abouot 100 pages into it and decided not to continue, for the idiosyncratic reason that I'd probably read about 90% of the same source material that Eco had used to research the book, and I didn't find enough value added by the fictional narrative or characters to make it any more compelling than the history and setting that I already knew.

― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, 31 October 2006 17:59 (nineteen years ago)

I'm glad I found this thread. I think (and I know this is a dangerous thing to say) this is my favourite book ever. It just hit every button for me, got better and better, explored all kinds of narratives which all worked perfectly - it sort of defined what fiction can be about, and how far it can go without losing it's essential story-ness.

― === temporary username === (Mark C), Saturday, 4 November 2006 11:59 (nineteen years ago)

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