Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Einband
Taschenbuch
Erscheinungsdatum
29.09.2026
Verlag
Ioakim IoakimSeitenzahl
84
Maße (L/B/H)
21,6/14/0,5 cm
Gewicht
119 g
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9798237468854
He is dying in Venice in January 1324, in the house on the Corte del Milion where he was born and to which he returned, after twenty-four years away, to find that no one entirely believed him. He is sixty-nine years old. The priests have come and the family has gathered and the city's polite skepticism is in the room with him. They want him to recant - to admit that the stories were the stories, that the million lies were the lies. He will not recant. He told the truth. He is still telling the truth. The truth is in the memory that is the last thing the dying takes with it. The Last Days of Marco Polo is a literary novel structured as the dying man's mind moving backward through the journey - from the deathbed in Venice to the Khan's court at Khanbaliq, from the old man nobody believes to the boy who left Venice at seventeen in 1271 and did not return for twenty-four years. The central question the novel asks and answers: how much of a man's life can survive when nobody believes his memory? The novel follows the memory through the full arc of the journey. The Silk Road - three and a half years from Venice to China through Persia and Central Asia and the Pamirs and the Gobi, the caravan and the altitude and the specific challenges of the road that only the traveler who has been there knows. Kublai Khan's court at Khanbaliq - the most powerful man in the world, the seventeen years of the Khan's service, the missions throughout the Chinese empire that produced the observations the book would eventually record. China - the cities and the markets and the paper money and the coal that burned and the postal system and the civilization that was more sophisticated than anything the European world had produced. The sea route home - the two years of the Indian Ocean voyage escorting the Mongol princess Kökejin to Persia, the fleet of fourteen ships that became three, the princess who wept at the parting. The return to Venice that nobody believed. The Genoese captivity and the collaboration with Rustichello of Pisa that produced the book. The thirty years of telling the stories that Venice called Il Milione - the man of a million lies. The disbelief that organized the last three decades of the life and that organized the deathbed of January 1324. And the answer that the centuries provided: Columbus sailed west in 1492 with the book annotated in his own hand, looking for the China that Marco Polo had described. The world was the size he said it was. The book survived. The disbelief of Venice did not. The Last Days of Marco Polo is the second book in The Legend Series by I. Ioakim - full-length literary historical fiction that enters the consciousness of the men who became larger than their own lives and stays there long enough to understand what it cost, and what it meant, to be that particular person in that particular world.
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