Lancette Arts - book08 Baudolino/Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,
An Illustrated Novel by Umberto Echo, Harcourt Inc., 469 pages, hardcover, $36.95, ISBN 0-15-101140-0

Baudolino
by Umberto Eco, Harcourt, Inc., 522 pages, hardcover, $40.00

Eco.jpg (8258 bytes)
Umberto Eco

By Alidë Kohlhaas

Umberto Eco's latest book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, has moved away from his usual medieval themes to the present and the more recent past of Italy from the mid-1920s to the end of the Second World War. The book's protagonist is Giambattista Bondini, a book antiquarian, who was born in December, 1931. He is not quite 60 years old as the story of this latest Eco novel opens. Bondini is coming out of a coma. He has lost his memory; he knows neither who he is or was, but when told his name, can instantly recall that his namesake was a famous 18^th century typographer.

It is soon apparent that the only things he knows is the content of his beloved books. He can quote from them with ease, but he is unable to recognize his wife, Paola, and their children and grandchildren. All of the memory connected with his emotional life appears to have vanished.

When asked by his doctor if he knows what year it is, he tells him he is sure that it is after the discovery of America. "You don't remember a date, any date before . . . your reawakening?"

"Any date? Nineteen hundred and forty-five, end of World War Two," is Bondini's reply. Actually, Eco sets the date for the start of this new novel as April 25, 1991. It, as the doctor says, can be called the Day of Liberation. Might this not only be Bondini's liberation from the coma, but also be an allusion to the date Benito Mussolini, known as Il Duce, fled towards Switzerland, his subsequent capture, and his execution by Partisans on April 28, 1945?

Bondini begins to rebuild his life by studying family papers at Solara, his family's country estate outside Milan. He spends endless hours going through his grandfather's collection — he, too, loved old books — and his own childhood memorabilia stored in the attic of the old house. This searching slowly brings to life his past. But it is an artificial rebuilding of memory. As Bondini says, his memory "is made of paper."

To emphasize this, Eco entertains us not only with a well crafted story, but with illustrations from his own collection; there are prints of movie posters, comic books, record covers, stamps, book covers and other visuals, all of which relate to the memories recalled by Bondini. These items, thereby, also bring to life for us with splendid images the early 20^th century. For some readers it will be a journey down memory lane, for others it will be a journey of discovery of an era that is connected with both glamour and great upheaval and pain.

Bondini does eventually regain his memory, but how and when is not for me to reveal. But as one follows the story, one begins to wonder if Eco is really not just spinning a yarn, but reminding his fellow Italians that they, too, have a past that is connected to the Fascist/Nazi era. This is, after all, a time when most western nations remember the 60^th anniversary of the end of WWII. His book was actually published in Italy in 2004, which is the 60^th anniversary of the landing of Allied forces in Sicily. The English translation came out in 2005.

True, unlike the Germans, the Italians eventually opted out of the war. Italy's King Victor Emanuel dismissed Il Duce after a vote of non-confidence in 1943 because of too many military misadventures, and the king's ministers obtained an armistice with the Allies; the Germans, however, rescued Il Duce from prison and made him head of a northern Italian Social Republic. When it was evident that all was lost, Il Duce tried to escape with his mistress to Switzerland at the end of the war. Partisans captured him near Lake Como, and executed him.

Italy had from the very beginning of that country's entry into WWII active partisan movements, albeit with different political aims. One, the Garibaldini, had mostly communist allegiances although some of its adherents were anarchists and socialists; the other, the Badogliani, backed the king and the House of Savoy. Neither group treated the joint enemy, the Fascists, with gentle hands. But Italy also had its Black Brigade, the equivalent of the early, thuggish German SA, before it lost some of its clout to the SS. This brigade of Italian thugs committed many atrocities, even during the 1920s; Jews, too, were collected in Italy and sent to concentration camps, some from right under the Vatican's nose. That is one of the reasons many see Pope Pius XII as having been a Nazi sympathizer.

Italians never were exposed to the wrath of the world as their former northern ally was, nor do modern Italians seem to feel any particular responsibility for participation in WWII. This despite their actions in Africa, their air attacks on Malta that left the island nation 60 percent destroyed, their invasion of Greece, their carving up of Yugoslavia with the Germans, their invasion of Albania, and their fighting side-by-side in other parts of Europe with German units, including Russia. Today, in Mussolini's hometown, Predappio, his statue still stands, and Il Duce is looked upon as a hero by many of the town's residents. There is even a neo-fascist party in Italy.

With this background, there are rich pickings for an inventive writer and Eco has used them to fashion a engaging book. Its title is taken from a comic book queen who fascinated Bondini as a young boy. He comes across Queen Loana again in Solara's attic. "The expression the mysterious flame had bewitched me, to say nothing of Loana's mellifluous name," Bondini reveals. Yet, as he re-reads these comics, he discovers that what in his childhood had literally obsessed him, turned out to be an insipid tale. He realizes that he may as a child have cultivated less of an image and more of that sound: "Loana".

Eco, a Piedmonter, now lives in Milan, a city that also has strong connections to Mussolini. His descriptions of the city are at times quite vivid. One of its features is that at certain times of the year it is shrouded in thick fog, which figures large in this novel. Bondini has a strong affinity to fog, and when he first begins to perceive the world again after coming out of his coma, fog is the first thing that enters his mind through highly descriptive passages from various pieces of literature.

Fog follows him through the whole life-span of the novel. Fog can hide us from others and things from us. It can, at certain times, become a comforting blanket, shielding us from reality. This preponderance of fog in the novel is, perhaps, Eco's way of telling us that we all conceive our lives through memories that over time begin to take on indistinct shapes as objects do when fog descends upon a landscape. To make sense of our past, we must struggle to push aside the fog so that the past once again comes into focus, and loses its indistinct shape. But especially, we must push aside the fog from our emotions, which may have become dulled through a desire to push away those memories that are painful or give us discomfort. For, if we cannot feel pain anymore, we can also no longer feel joy.

January 2003

Baudolino. . .
A story imaginatively woven

By Alidë Kohlhaas

Baudo1.jpg (10560 bytes) Throughout the ages wondrous tales have been spun by known and unknown storytellers. Some might call them lies, others myths, and some might call them enchanting or gruesome entertainment. A mixture of truth and imagination is contained in all of the best stories ever told. Aesop used animals in his fables to tell us the truth about human nature. Fairytales were meant to teach lessons to young and old alike. Myths often involve real historical characters around whom fabulous stories has been woven to enhance or diminish the character. The novel is a modern development out of the ancient art of storytelling, and one of the best novelists in our own age is Umberto Eco.

The Italian novelist and professor of semiotics first caught the world’s attention with his The Name of the Rose, in which he visited the 14^th century. He now has given us Baudolino. In this new work he goes a little further back in history than in his first book of many years ago. Baudolino, named for its main character, starts at the very beginning of the 13^th century, in 1204, and from there works backward to the mid-1100s.

Baudolino is a most engrossing central figure, whose story encompasses his life from about age 12 in 1155 to 1204 when he arrives in the Byzantine capital. It is April and Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) is under invasion by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Baudolino has just saved Niketas Choniates, a historian and former court orator, judge and chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, from certain death by the marauding crusaders and their unruly followers. Niketas is not sure if Baudolino is telling the truth or weaving a fanciful tale to amuse him.

Baudo2.jpg (12394 bytes) Eco has created a most unusual hero in his story, which is part truth and part fiction. The writer reports on a world in which people still believed strongly in strange beasts, monstrous or benign creatures that are partly human; he reveals to us an era in which those people had absolutely no idea about the world beyond their immediate surroundings. Many of the stories circulating at that time described a world full of exotic and terrifying beasts and humans. They were based on descriptions by travelers who had ventured further than the next village or town. Many were still believed centuries later, even as late as the 18^th century. And lest we feel smug, let’s not forget that even today, in the 21^st century, there are people who believe in UFOs, and that humans were cloned from some outer space creature.

One of those medieval storytellers was Sir John Mandeville, who lived in the 1300s and whose stories about the East were published in 1366. Eco makes good use of this 14^th century travelogue, but also of the description in the famous letter from the mysterious Presbyter (Prester) John, which Mandeville included in his book. Unlike The Name of the Rose, Baudolino is not a medieval detective story. Baudolino is no William of Baskerville (who is based on the great William of Ockham of Ockham’s razor fame). Instead, Eco has used Baudolino’s great imagination to solve some riddles that historians have been unable to solve to this day. It is up to the reader to disband disbelief and go along with the tale that Baudolino tells us.

Young Baudolino, named for a saint who is said to have had the ability to see the future, encounters a nobleman on a horse in thick fog that to this day is a feature of the Piedmont Region of Italy, especially along the Tanaro River. The boy leads the lost noble out of the fog to his father’s hut, not knowing who he is. In the process he tells the stranger, who is clearly a German, that Tortona will fall to the German troops because St. Baudolino told him so in a vision. This news so delights the noble, he offers the father, Gagliaudo, five coins for the son, whom he promises to teach how to read and write.

The noble, of course, was Frederic I or Barbarossa, the Holy Roman emperor and king of Germany, Italy, and duke of Swabia. Young Baudolino enters into the emperor’s realm because of his remarkable proclivity for language, and his ability to tell stories.

As the book unfolds, Baudolino admits freely to Niketas that he is a liar, but has found to his own amazement that many of his lies become true, something that greatly confuses him. Baudolino then begins to tell the story of how he learned about Prester John from his teacher, Otto, Bishop of Freisingen, who also happened to be an uncle of Barbarossa, and his chronicler.

This is another true story that Eco uses to let his liar tell his tale. Otto wrote in his Chronicles in 1145 about this fabled Christian ruler of some distant, unreachable realm, who is said to be a descendant of the Three Magi. His source was Hugo, Bishop of Cabala. After Otto’s death, a letter began to circulate around 1160 that claimed to be from this Prester John. It was addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Emanuel I. A copy also reached Pope Alexander III, who in 1177 sent his physician and friend, Master Philip, eastward with a letter to find this Prester John. Philip made it to Palestine, but after that vanished, never to be heard of again. To this day more than 100 copies of this letter still exist, addressed to a number of different personages.

Baudolino promised Otto, and later the emperor, that he will go to seek this Presbyter John. In the process he also became involved in the search for the Holy Grail. But first, the boy grows into a youth and then young man in Paris, where he meets up with an assortment of scholars, all of whom become inspired by the tale of Prester John. As we learn from the novel, it is Baudolino, who is the source of the letter.

Barbarossa4.jpg (9974 bytes) Another mystery that still plagues historians is how and why Barbarossa died from apparent drowning in a river while he led the third Crusade. A strong swimmer he is said to have drowned in the Calycadnus River, a fairly shallow river in what is now Turkey, shortly after winning the battle of Iconium. Since his son also died on this crusade, and since the German Crusaders returned home without Barbarossa’s body, the true circumstances of his death have never been confirmed.

Because of the unusual circumstances of the emperor’s death, a myth arose among Germans that the emperor had moved with his soldiers into the Kyffhäuser Mountain in the electorate of Thuringia. Germans believed that, in the ancient mythological spirit of Wodan and Frau Holle, the emperor would some day return to lead Germans into a new, prosperous era. Late medieval German poets celebrated this myth, which also became entwined with Barbarossa’s grandson, Frederic II, who in addition to being Holy Roman Emperor became King of Sicily. Among those who wrote about this salvation myth was the13^th century poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, who also gave us the Holy Grail romance, Parsival, which Richard Wagner turned into the great opera, Parsifal. Adolf Hitler exploited both of these myths to the fullest during his 13-year reign of terror.

Author Eco grew up in the Piedmont town of Alessandria, which features large in this novel. It was built in 1168 to defy Barbarossa. The town’s patron saint is the Baudolino for whom the novel’s protagonist is named; there is also a statue to one Gagliaudo in Alessandria, who in this town’s mythology is said to have saved it from destruction by Barbarossa’s forces by sacrificing his cow. So, there we have more truths and myths intertwined. Eco uses this material to wonderful effect. He plays with his readers and challenges them to discern what is truth and what is lie, what is reality and what is fiction.

There are just two aspects of the English translation that give me trouble. They relate to the flora and fauna of the Middle Ages. Baudolino tells Niketas that in a country on the edge of the kingdom of Prester John (he never actually manages to reach the kingdom) among all the exotic animals he encountered there roamed llamas. One wonders if the translator mixed up the mythological lamias with this New World animal unknown to Europeans until the discovery of the Americas. A lamia is said to have the head and chest of a woman, but the body of a serpent (lamias are mentioned in Prester John’s letter) and they suck the blood out of youths and children. This creature would seem much more applicable to Baudolino’s story. As for the flora in question, in a touching scene in which Baudolino encounters his love Hypatia, there is mention of heliotropes and sunflowers. Perhaps at one time there existed some kind of flower in the Old World that acted like a heliotrope, but the flower we know today came from Peru. As for the sunflower, it and all its variations, including the Jerusalem Artichoke, also came from the Americas and so could not have been known by Baudolino or anyone else in medieval times.

It seems unusual that someone like Eco, who is so meticulous in his research, would make such gaffes. I prefer to think these are the result of mistranslation, or the impishness of a printing error.

That aside, this is a wonderful novel. It is easy to read, delightful in its fancy, dark in its allegories, and human to its very last word. A must-have and must-read book for any discerning reader.

Baudo3.jpg (28314 bytes)

A book that also deals with the period of the First Crusade
is Pilgermann by Russell Hoban