Baudolino

De: Umberto Eco

Narrado por: George Guidall

As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends him to university in Paris. After he allies with a group of fearless and adventurous fellow students, they go in search of a vast kingdom to the East - a kingdom of strange creatures, eunuchs, unicorns and, of course, lovely maidens.

Fusing historical events with myths and fables, this is a lighthearted, splendid tale.

©2000 RCS Libri S.p.A (P)2002 Recorded Books

Beautiful wanderer

Reccomended for lovers of history and fantasy and where those two things overlap. If you enjoy getting lost in mysterious medieval maps you will love following the long long tale of Baudolino. Delicious language and loved the reader's voice.

10/10

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

Fantastic story with a great narrator.

A fascinating story made all the better by the philosophy, history, and theology woven throughout.

A fine tale.

This book is a mixture of medieval myth and medieval history as told by a congenital lyre. It's fun to try to detect where the truth ends and fantasy takes over. The reader is, as usual, superb and adds a great deal to the enjoyment of the book. A great escape.

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

Masterpiece

The great Umberto Eco doesn't need any additional praise or commentary. But I have to give a shout out to George Guidall for his phenomenal narration of Baudolino. What a performance! How did he do it? It takes a special talent to keep pace with Eco's milling crowd of characters, wisecracking and yelling at one another. Not to mention the nonstop linguistic pranks in Italian, Greek, Arabic and assorted fantasy languages. Just amazing and hilarious.

Get this audio version and give it a listen. You can thank me later.

An absolutely fantastic story

Highly recommended to anyone with an imagination, and anyone with skin think enough for blasphemies.

Fantastic Reading of a great sprawling tale

The reading is really first rate. The story itself is one of my favorites, hilarious in many ways, and the reading makes it a pleasure to listen to

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).