.
Is it a good lie for a good cause? Yes Baudolino is undoubtedly the most brilliant good liar of all times for his
village, his emperor, Frederic Barberousse, that his first plots of teenager allured and who, under the incognito of a traveller of passage, and against sounding currency, obtains from his parents the permission to take him along like man of company.
In the court of Barberousse, Baudolino is then put to write the History, not by relating the events, but by creating them and by forcing them to occur.
After having invented the kingdom of the Jean Priest and Graal, Baudolino, which believes hard in his fables, put at their research, in charge of an official legation by the emperor, to whom was sent by the Jean Priest in person an invitation created by the hero and his companions, in the shape of a parchment which becomes a historical document.
And of course during his voyages, with the length of his years, Baudolino meets all the beings which he imagined, visit all the areas born of his poetic thought, saw all the events that he predicted to see, and maked the chronicle of it.
And of course he will fall in love with Hypathie, creature of his own dreams, with which he will live a very beautiful history of love, in spite of the hairy legs and the shoes of the beautiful young person girl-goat.
Baudolino, taken in its lie, can only endeavour to return real what he says:
I from now on was devoted to the lie. It is difficult to imagine what occurred in my head. I said myself: as long as you invented, you invented things which were not true, but they became realite. The capacity of the lie is such as it is enough to believe true a relic and one perceives the perfume of it.
The narration is succulent. There is some Rabelais and Cervantès in this merry fresco, loose-living woman, rising, and the reader has fun until in the account, often delirious, of the worst atrocities. The lexical inventions are as many jewels which raise the glare of the told facts and the speeches of the characters.
Etonnant and clashing, the novel, picaresque and baroque, is punctuated reflexions which one would readily put in the critical spirit of Montaigne.
The turn of force of Umberto Ecco is to write in the 21e century a medieval novel and Baudolino becomes the hero of the chronicles until becoming, by doing this, a medieval writer: but one knows the immense talent of the author of the Name of the Rose.
Then one is regaled, pourlèche, feasts, while dribbling without embarrassment and by essuyant reverse of the sleeve quickly, for not to lose any detals of this epic writing, these tournaments of imagination! It is enormous!
Here certainly one of my most outstanding readings of these last years
Published: February 08, 2006
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