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A review by roxanamalinachirila
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
5.0
I am a geek, giving a geek's rating. If you lack patience for essays on medievalism, you'll probably prefer to throw this book against the wall.
It's incredibly rich in detail, with a lovely narrator who loves to lie - or at least, to make stories much better than they really are by adding things to them that aren't true, but ought to be. Luckily, all of Baudolino's lies are actually truths: Umberto Eco took his job of documenting the medieval spirit absolutely seriously. All creatures, places and events mentioned in the book do in fact exist - if not in reality, at least in medieval bestiaries.
Well, almost all. Some very obscure things are actually references to other books. For example, some sort-of-anthropomorphic creatures who have never seen horses before Baudolino and his friends bring some into their land, call horses "houyhnhnm", which is what Swift called his intelligent horses in "Gulliver's Travels".
Baudolino-the-book is also versatile, switching from a somewhat historical account, to a mystery novel, to an almost fairy tail-like style as it goes on.
It's wonderful, it's rich, it's a bit difficult - and all in all, if it's your sort of thing, it's really lovely.
It's incredibly rich in detail, with a lovely narrator who loves to lie - or at least, to make stories much better than they really are by adding things to them that aren't true, but ought to be. Luckily, all of Baudolino's lies are actually truths: Umberto Eco took his job of documenting the medieval spirit absolutely seriously. All creatures, places and events mentioned in the book do in fact exist - if not in reality, at least in medieval bestiaries.
Well, almost all. Some very obscure things are actually references to other books. For example, some sort-of-anthropomorphic creatures who have never seen horses before Baudolino and his friends bring some into their land, call horses "houyhnhnm", which is what Swift called his intelligent horses in "Gulliver's Travels".
Baudolino-the-book is also versatile, switching from a somewhat historical account, to a mystery novel, to an almost fairy tail-like style as it goes on.
It's wonderful, it's rich, it's a bit difficult - and all in all, if it's your sort of thing, it's really lovely.