I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. I find Eco’s fiction a little bit hit-and-miss; I’m very much a fan of Foucault’s Pendulum, but couldn’t finish The Island of the Day Before and didn’t feel I had the knowledge of the medieval church required to enjoy The Name of the Rose. So far Baudolino‘s keeping me entertained, though.
In parts, it’s kind of like Foucault’s Pendulum eight centuries previous. In the earlier book, you have a group of bored publishers patching together mystical conspiracies and secret societies into a Plan, which then has the misfortune of being believed. In the chapter I just finished of the more recent book, we see a group of students doing much the same thing, weaving a pastiche of legend and rumour into an account of the Kingdom of Prester John. In Pendulum, the narrator’s downfall and that of his colleagues was that they got sucked in to the very system of thought that the started out by parodying. I don’t think that’s where this book is going; rather, the characters here are proceeding completely without irony, apparently believing that they are uncovering — or perhaps creating — the truth of the matter in their fancies. It’s an interesting twist on the theme.
In addition, so far this seems to be the most readable of the Eco novels that I’ve essayed. Pendulum is very good but very dense, and it takes a while to find its rhythm. Baudolino seems to have a much clearer idea of where it’s going.