by Amin Maalouf
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Product Description
It is 1665, and all the signs and portents foretell that next year the Antichrist will appear and the world will come to an end. Antiquarian merchant and sage Balthasar sets out in search of a rare book that may bring salvation to a distraught world, a mysterious work entitled The Hundredth Name. In the course of his odyssey throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, Balthasar travels through countries in ruin, cities in flames, and stricken communities awaiting the Apocalypse. He encounters fear, falsehood, and disillusion, but he also discovers love at a time when he had given up all hope.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Great book, 2008-10-24
This book, as are most of Amin Maalouf's books, is amazing, the story is very well told and it is captivating. I bought it after having read it years ago in my school library, and I've read it several times over the years.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone, it is a great read, very enjoyable.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
One of Maaloufs most popular books., 2007-07-02
Maalouf (probably one of the most popular writers in the Middle East from Egypt to Turkey) gives us another of his historical novels.
Set in a time when many thought the end of the world was iminent (something like at the start of the year 2000) The story surrounds a Lebanese bookseller who goes out in search of a mysterious book that contains the '100th name' (based upon God having 99 names and attributes known to man) This myserious 100th name is a name hidden from man.
He travels to Turkey to witness the movement of Sabbetai Sevi whose followers would later be known in Turkey as the 'Donme' then on to Europe where he witnessed the great fire of London.
While some may be critical of some of the historical detial in the novel (the strange Muslim sect for example dont seem to have any historical base) he is mostly praised for bringing history to life and this book is no exception. The lives of the people of the time are wonderfully brought to life something no history book could do.
Probably a book for the airport while waiting for that flight or sitting on a plane with nothing more than a 9 hour journey to look forward to.
Decent read, you will probablyl have it finished in a day, 2 at best but still worth a read.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Pleasant reading, 2006-11-19
It was a pleasant reading. The plot intertwins between Ottoman beauracratic intrigues and personal curiosity. The narrator travels important cities in 17th century and goes through mysterious events. With somewhat magical juxtaposition, the narrator tries to connect those misfortunes that he suffered to the metaphysical book titled 'The Hundredth Name.' His passion for this book made him travel this part of the world with mixed feelings. He faced humiliation, love, betrayal, then fortune again etc. However I must say, Amin Malouf's mastery lies with Leo Africanus or Samarkhand, not in this book.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Mediterranean Journey to the Past, 2006-03-23
For readers expecting Mediterranean adventures, intertwined with religiously related stories, look no further. This is a story of a Genoese book trader called Balthasar Embriaco or Baldassarro Embriaco who lived near a southwestern part of Mediterranea.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism were part of the everyday life in this plot set sometime between 1665-1667. The year 1666 was supposedly to be the year of the Beast. But don't expect anything as unconventional as the Da Vinci's Code by Dan Brown.
This novel was written in a diary style, which the "author", Balthasar, put his daily experiences and thoughts into his dairies. In fact "he" wrote four diaries during the span of this novel.
Summing it up: a romantic novel with a Mediteranean background, which the author exploited quite well, and voyages to London, Lisbon, Paris and other Mediterranean European countries. Mr. Maalouf has done an extremely detailed research prior to publishing it.
I enjoyed this book very much, though not the best novel I have read. Thus, a four star.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Exchanging views-- a meditation on communication and history. , 2006-01-22
I have to confess that I did not expect to enjoy Balthasar's Odyssey. I had chosen it on the strength of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes and it was only after I bought it that I became aware of the mixed reviews and the unhappy readers.
I am pleased to say that in the end I enjoyed it quite a bit. Far from discouraging me in reading further in the Maalouf novels, it has encouraged me to think that I will enjoy the rest of his work. I will be picking up Samarkand next, I think.
The key to enjoying Balthasar's Odyssey is in having the proper expectations before you read the book. Based on my two-book selection I will say that Maalouf writes history like a novelist, and novels like a historian.
I can understand why so many readers were irritated. Maalouf does not tie up his loose ends. Unexplained motivations remain unexplained. Things are lost and never found again. Conversations remain unfinished and characters disappear, never to reemerge. If you are looking for a plot in a restorative Hollywood sense, you will not find it in this book.
What Balthasar's Odyssey is about, fundamentally, is communication. Balthasar is a Levantine seller of books and antiquities. His family came to the Levant from Genoa, and are famous for being foreigners-- "the last Genoese to come to this part of the world." The quest for the book "The Hundredth Name" takes him on an amazing journey to Constantinople, the Mediterranean, London and France-- all in the aid of finding an answer to a question that he is not even sure needs answering.
Along the way, he meets people from all over the world. He travels with a mysterious Persian prince, becomes close to a woman in London just prior to the great fire, flees through France with an Austrian emigrant, and finally has to come to terms with his "own"-- Genoese families who know him by family name rather than in person.
The trip and its goal are largely incidental. The beauty of this book are in the moments of communication that Balthasar is able to find with his fellow travellers. If you set those conversations and efforts at cultural understanding against the backdrop of 1666 (the year of the beast), you have a complex and quietly cutting commentary that just as easily applies to our own time as it does to history.
The translation seemed largely very good (aside from a tendancy to over-use exclamation points) and Maalouf is a very good writer. The journal form works well for the subject, but does take a little bit of persistence on the part of the reader in the beginning.
I would recommend Balthasar's Odyssey to people who like intelligent historical literary fiction. It will probably appeal more to people who like Pamuk than it will to fans of Eco. A potential readers should be comfortable with non-traditional plotting and not be expecting too much in the way of resolution.
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