His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

Eco uses this focus on lies and lying to interrogate our understanding of history, presenting it as a collective illusion that is constructed to fit the demands of the present rather than the events of the past.Philosophical debates are mixed with comedy, epic adventure and creatures drawn from medieval bestiaries. This part involves an element of secret history – the book asserts that Emperor Frederick had not drowned in a river, as history records, but died mysteriously at night while hosted at the castle of a sinister Armenian noble. Like George MacDonalnd Fraser, Eco looks at history through the skewed eye of a born cheat, liar and charlatan with a gift for languages and an eye for the ladies.

As the men make their way to safety Baudolino begins to recount, with numerous digressions and contradictions, his extraordinary life story. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Born an Italian peasant, Baudolino claims to have been adopted as a boy by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. You see, Baudolino, an imaginary adopted son of emperor Frederick Barbarossa (who is a real historical figure, by the way), is a bit of a trickster.So beneath the entertaining exotica of Baudolino’s narrative lies Eco’s real interest: How do we narrate the past when language itself becomes untrustworthy? It is the year 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. The young Baudolino’s desire to construct his own version of reality is to become a recurring theme in the novel, for when his theft of Otto’s manuscripts appears to be on the brink of discovery, Baudolino simply forges new ones from his own imagination. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. Credo quia impossibile" (I believe because it is impossible), Tertullian said about the Christian story.

Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine high official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. The fourth novel by the prolific Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932–2016) charts the adventurous life of the eponymous hero, a medieval adventurer and consummate liar with a gift for making the most of chance. The death of Frederick Barbarossa is presented as a classic "sealed room" mystery, from the modern detective story, in which the emperor might have been killed by any number of ingenious devices, including a vacuum-making machine. It is held together by being, at one of its levels, a sustained parody of a Sherlock Holmes investigation.These creatures and many others were all described and named by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historiæ from 77 AD: A monopod and a satyr (top); a blemmyae and a panotti (above). To make things even more interesting, most of Baudolino's story is narrated by himself, giving the 'unreliable narrator' trope to a whole new level. Nature abhors a vacuum" and things rush into the emptiness of created vacua, both in the flask and in the mind.