I think it is all about the vacuum.

Take a container with an opening, and a small hole in the bottom. Cover it with your finger, submerge it in water, save the bottom. Remove your finger. Water will enter where you have created the vacuum.

Or perhaps you will have created a trip that begins in a swampy village yet to become a city, yet to be reborn as a proper city that takes us as far as the kingdom of Prester John (which seems to not quite be all the way to Pakistan) and back, and possibly back again.

Baudolino speaks every language and lies in each of them, he is a master of facts and stories, though he has fabricated most of them and doesn’t know which. And so we follow him through his story into the kingdom of self-created myths, blending fiction and fact in such a way that eight hundred years later they are nearly impossible to tell apart.

Based on our bookgroup discussion one of Brianne’s professors stated that this was Eco proving he knows everything. And it seems like he might. Eco’s personal library is 30,000 books (think double my basement) and it shows. The historical fiction is filled with facts in far more places than I would expect and when actual events are absent the gaps are filed with mythology. Or possibly the gaps are just the interstitial vacuum between corpuscles.

But then nature fears the vacuum.

(I need to read more.)

- Bookgroup November 2007.

I loved this book. Not only is it (well researched) historical fiction which I enjoy because it allows the reader to learn a lot about a period of time in a very enjoyable way, but I also like the theme of the nature of reality prevalent in the novel. Eco presents Baudolino as a story within a story as told by the character Baudolino, which get more fantastic and outlandish as it goes.

Eco’s food descriptions also made me very hungry :)

Highly recommended.

September