His new novel, Baudolino, is in every respect a thinking man's adventure story. Like all his previous fiction, the central figure is a dramatic shard of Eco himself, splintering wondrously through the world, finding the droll in the extraordinary, discerning the miraculous in the commonplace. There seem to be little in or out of the main line of Western letters that Eco has not read and nothing in which he does not find an important relation to his scholarly projects. And for Eco, the term "scholarly" must apply as much to the act of telling stories as interpreting them.
If his 1995 Island of the Day Before was a kind of ribald fantasia on the global politics of the 17th century's scramble to solve the longitude problem, then this new tale is a laughing man's rejoinder to the presumption that Medieval Europe was a joke with no punchline. In fact, the naive pretensions of post-modernity that compel otherwise informed readers to imagine that the "Dark Ages" were, somehow, actually dark is the point of departure for Baudolino's remarkable narrative success. Here, we have a 13th-century bon-vivant-savant whose gift for languages and being in the right place at the right time create a proto-Forrest Gumpesque tapestry of comic coincidences tracing the rise of Byzantium's magnificent Constantinople and the opening of the Western eye to Eastern mysticism.
Wildly episodic and splendidly detailed, Baudolino is exactly what the name calls to mind, a picaresque, irreverent, fantastical and erudite melange of fictive forays into the living textures of our collective past. The central thesis is, of course, that Baudolino's world, like that of Belbo from Foucault's Pendulum or Adso of Melk from The Name of the Rose, is also our own and that the human heart, if it is to be understood at all, must be imagined in the context of an evolving human experience, one in which voices projected from illusion are merely echoes of our reality.
Baudolino by Umberto Eco. Harcourt. $27. 522 pages.
