Kona

Ok, I waited a week, but now I need to tell you about Kona.

So I went and stayed at the King Kam. Do the same thing if you want to watch the triathletes – it was quite the spectacle. From my cheap hotel room I had neither window nor mountain view, but I had an unobstructed view of the assembly space where the triathletes gathered. And there were quite a few of those – in all shapes, ages, genders and groupings. The funniest was a father with two dogs and two kids – and they all jumped into the water and swam out towards the open sea. What a sight!

Aztec Autums (G. Jennings)

Oh, what high praise was lavished on this book! It seemed the entire elite of the Nation threw itself on these few hundred pages, naming Mr. Jennings the greatest writer of history in the land.
Well, not much to deserve. The story is that of a warrior in a far-off city in Northern Mexico who decides he wants revenge and decides to defeat the Spaniards who killed his father, burning him on the stake under the eyes of his (unknowing at that time) son.
There are many reasons why the book doesn’t work. First, the development of the story is extremely uneven, with those parts that the book should have amplified (given the fictitious premise it is an account of the glory of this man) largely neglected; then, the opinions of the main character are more from the view point of the U.S. moralist of the 20th century that the fresh voice of a Mexican of the 16th; finally, while its predecessor was indeed a page turner, this one is as bad an attempt to copy the former success as is typical in a different genre, in movies.
No need to comment further. Stay away, if you don’t need to read this book.

Baudolino (U. Eco)

Yet another Umberto Eco novel that plays in the Middle Ages. This one has the advantage of touching one of my dearest subjects in history, the fall of Byzantium, but otherwise, well…
This is the story of Baudolino, a character that makes it from the humbles upbringing to becoming adoptive son to the greatest of all German emperors, Frederick Barbarossa (“red-beard’). Frederick needs to go on a crusade, so Baudolino does. But Baudolino has the added mission to discover the Holy Grail.
Eco has always been very fond of the closeness of truth and invention. In his first novel, “The Name of the Rose”, the classical whodunit tale spins in a medieval convent, where everybody lies to advance themselves in some way. The plot is master, and the development of characters and ambiance suffers.
His second novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, was much more of my liking, although it didn’t reach the same success that its predecessor accomplished. I liked it so much, indeed, that I completed a translation into Esperanto, soon killed by malevolent colleagues.
His third novel, “The Island of the Day Before”, fared even worse. I bought it in Italy, but was so bored by the premise that I never read it to the end. And I had given up on Eco for good.
Now, Baudolino. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the main characters (if there are such) invent a history and by doing so modify the present. They decide to guise a plot that ties the Templars with the Rosicrucians, and thence to the present. And although the plot is made up, the consequences are real.
In Baudolino, the making up is integral part of the story, and it is unclear at all times what is true and what isn’t. The narrator doesn’t know, we don’t know, and the book doesn’t know. It was indeed fascinating to be swayed on this long journey of discovery.
Yet, somehow the book ends up being flat. It doesn’t reveal anything but the fact that people lie, and that’s not a revelation that is good enough to carry 300 pages. And the more crazy the assertions go, the less we are going to believe them. Baudolino ends up in the land of monsters? Sure enough, it’s just a novel.
If the book were not just a mere continuation of the other novels, it is made even worse by the translation. William Weaver is really unimaginative when it comes to Italian, and he is not willing to follow the switch from vernacular to high Italian in the original. Some of the characters will speak their dialect throughout the book, but the translation reveals that only in odd phrases.
There is a reference to something being not more important than a dry fig. Funny expression, isn’t it? Well, in Italian “non me ne importa un fico secco” means “I really don’t give a damn’”, and has as much to do with dried figs as comparing apples and oranges has with apples or oranges. Why Mr. Weaver didn’t weave this into his translation, I can’t guess. It gives me a chance to get rid of a horrible pun.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (P. Hoffman)

Admittedly, the life of a mathematician doesn’t quite make a likely beach reading. I was surprised by myself as I packed it in my backpack on the way to Kona, but surely do not regret it.
Mathematicians, as the book quotes, are all a bit out of their mind. Their make wonderfully eccentric characters that charm you even where the subject matter of their work bores you. That was the case with Alan Turing (Enigma), John Nash (A Beautiful Mind), and a lot of other mathematicians.
This book is about Paul Erdos (pronounced ‘Erdish’ much to my surprise) and his vagaries in number theory. Somehow number theory has become an immensely boring branch of mathematics, where the weapons at hand are so much bigger than the problems that you wonder why you would want to enter the field.
Paul Hoffmann loves Erdos the way only we lesser intellects can love those we would adore if we actually had met them. It is wonderful to feel with him how he goes through all the details of the eccentricity, but still has to admit this was a more than brilliant person. What a marvel!

Baudolino (U. Eco)

There is something that always fascinated me about Umberto Eco: he manages to remain faithful to his main theme, to focus more and more on it, to become a better writer, to accomplish more and better things; and yet he is tied to trail his own success with his first novel.
“The Name of the Rose” was an admirable exercise in medieval crime novel, and was so successful that it spawned an enormous following of second and third (and fourth) tier colleagues. The monk-as-detective became all the rage, and the movie from the film was a huge success.
Despite all of this, the book suffered heavily from the lack of experience of the writer: descriptions would end up taking pages and pages and interrupt the flow of narration at the most inopportune times; the actors were wooden and caricatured instead of portrayed; the story was a bit predictable and too much like a classical ‘whodunit’.
So one would think, when he improves on all these elements, Eco would be more successful. Wrong guess! His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, was no match for his audience. The third, the Island of the Day Before, was too dull even for me; and finally, Baudolino, has barely been acknowledged.
Yet Baudolino succeeds as a novel. The storyline is coherent and well orchestrated. No longer does Eco bore us with endless enumerations just when we need to know what happened to the hero; no more is the hero barely able to have a relationship with anyone – this time there are lots of aventures amoureuxes.
Should you read it? If you have an interest in late medieval history, of course. If not, not really worth it. And I can tell you for sure – I have read the book with gusto, because I am really fascinated by the period and the location (Constantinople around 1204); but somehow the book fills me with a generic: ‘so what?’ that none of the other ones did.

19 Friday - Landing And Two Beaches

2003-09-19 Big Island

21 Sunday - Kilauea

22 Monday - Hunting For Dl Extension

23 Tuesday - Around The Island Mauna Kea