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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Baudolino (2000)
Umberto Eco
Impression published on Saturday, 2009-12-05 | Novel | 3 stars
When I started reading Umberto Eco's novels a little over a year ago, I held the sympathetic (as opposed to the antagonistic) version of the opinion of his work that is common among people who haven't really read his novels: he was a super smart guy who wrote nearly impenetrable page-turners that intelligent people (i.e. people whose intelligence I held in high regard) seemed to enjoy.*
After I read Il Nome della Rosa , my first, I'm unashamed to say I was awe-struck: not only did he have a death-grip on everything they teach you in the contemporary academy about the middle ages, he wrote with the dry, sardonic wit and hostile cynicism about man's baser impulses (as glorified, ironically, in the exultant texts that pre-modern man has left as the only records of his myriad ribaldries and epic insobriety) of my favorite Classics professors, while simultaneously being as engaging and witty as a Mary Roach or a Chuck Palahniuk but without losing the fastidiousness and razor-sharp ear for semantic subtlety that you get from hard-hitting academic authors like Stanley Fish or Miri Rubin.
Now that I've got a few of Eco's under my belt, I'm less over-awed by them, and more grateful for them: when, for example, I find myself squinting at our nation's capitol through the hastily etched graffito of the semi-literate bi-pedal HIV incubators on the safety glass of one of the WMATA's speeding electric death traps, watching a pickup game of "cops and robbers" being played out between the native population and the local constabulary on the ubiquitous unlit, trash-strewn, broken-glass pathways that lead from the corner stores to the storefront churches (but which, of course, stop abruptly at the boundaries of the monumental district and DC's impacted yuppie burb-claves of Georgetown and DuPont Circle), the fact that someone writes as gracefully and charmingly as Eco writes and that the fact that he's written so many novels is somewhere in the back of my mind, serving as a small but important reminder that civilization still exists (somewhere) and that people still care about writing well and writing honestly and setting novels in novel settings.
And now that I've finished Baudolino, I find that I am doubly glad, for I leave this one with the firm impression that, while not his best or most engaging work, this novel definitely represents Eco at his most joyous and carefree, and it makes me happy to suspect that this writer, whose works have brought me so much happiness, is actually having fun writing them.
Because, let's be real for a second: the publishing business is a toilet and most contemporary novelists have to ford a raging river of manure just to get published, let alone taken seriously enough for word of mouth to get as far as casual consumers of novel-length fiction like me.
Regarding the work itself, all I really feel I need to say is that the dust jacket literally does this one no justice by calling it a fusion of "historical events of the twelfth century with myths and fables, juicy romance," etc. Baudolino is so much more than that: it's not exactly the obverse of Il pendolo di foucault (the obverse would be something like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: something where the medieval legend actually turns out to correspond to whatever version that Frazer attempts to pass off as authoritative in The Golden Bough), but it works with a lot of the same concepts and intellectual and emotional habits of men. It does this work, however, with much less ennui, irony and melancholy and much more zest, (unironic) humor and knee-scraping, commode-hugging abandon.
It's kind of like one of Mark Twain's early works, if Twain wrote it in and about medieval Europe: not so folksy that you had to be there to get the jokes, but not so straight-laced that the inevitable dick jokes can't be retold in the low language that does them any justice.
*The "antagonistic" version of the common opinion among people who haven't really read co is, of course, that he, as evidenced by his propensity to write obscuritanist novels of unusual length about the dark ages (which are themselves obscure by definition, thus making his novels doubly obscure) in multiple languages, is an arrogant old fart who only writes novels in order to thumb his knobby little nose at the world and say, "hey everybody--look at me: I'm so much smarter than everyone! And just in case you didn't get that, I'll repeat it in Latin, Hebrew, German and Gödel's encoded symbolic logic notation, just to make sure that everyone in the world understands just how incredibly freaking smart I am!" Obviously, people who claim to enjoy (for who could really enjoy that kind of inane, masturbatory, cock-crowing?) Eco's novels only make such statements because they think they're better than the rest of us.
