Baudolino

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You can't help but wonder if there is really such a thing as a small white lie in service of bigger historical truth.

As always with Eco, this abundant novel includes dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, pages of extraordinary feeling and poetry, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age. Up until this point, Baudolino follows Eco’s previous novels in its mixing of detective fiction with philosophical speculation, producing a complex discussion about the nature of history. The 'modern classics' label hadn't really made me want to get into his works, somehow making them seem even more stuffy and dreary than authors filed under 'classics'. To make things even more interesting, most of Baudolino's story is narrated by himself, giving the 'unreliable narrator' trope to a whole new level.Niketas is amazed by his language genius, speaking many languages he has never heard, and Baudolino begins to recount his life story to Niketas. They have no voice of their own and remain flat and two-dimensional, not fully imagined, nor yet distanced, hinted and layered.

Even when he is sent to Paris to be schooled (and to avoid his growing attraction to Frederick’s new wife, the young Empress Beatrice), his habit of generating false realities continues. 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 the year 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade.Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts - a talent for learning foreign languages and skill in telling lies. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This part involves an element of secret history – the book asserts that Emperor Frederick had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while hosted at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble. 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.