Numero Zero by Umberto Eco - review

Umberto Eco, 83, is Italy’s best known literary export. His surprise bestseller, The Name of the Rose, sold more than six million copies; not since One Hundred Years of Solitude had there been such a consensual success on the book market. Eco’s fiction typically displays a Moulinex mish-mash of influences, ranging from Donald Duck to Kafka to Conan Doyle. His last novel, The Prague Cemetery, was nevertheless boring in parts and too long.

Numero Zero, Eco’s seventh novel, is much better. A razor-sharp thriller set in Milan in 1992, it offers a satire of Italy’s kickback and bribery culture as well as, among other things, the legacy of Fascism. A hack writer named Colonna finds himself working for a new Milanese newspaper financed by a Berlusconi-type tycoon and property wheeler-dealer known as “Il Cavaliere”. Rather than report news, Domani (Tomorrow) cynically fabricates gossip and serves as an instrument to blackmail political opponents.

Among the staff is a hare-brained conspiracy theorist, Romano Braggadocio, who claims to have stumbled on shattering news. Mussolini had not been executed by Italian anti-Fascists in the spring of 1945, as everyone believed. The corpse they strung up in that infamous square in Milan was a “body-double” of the real Mussolini, who had managed to escape to Argentina. What a scoop. Is Braggadocio serious?

As the story unfolds, Eco displays a typically Italian fascination in the national science of dietrologia (literally, “behindology”), which presumes that secret cliques, Mafioso-style camarillas and neo-Fascist consortiums everywhere manipulate political scandals. At the war’s end, according to Braggadocio, Mussolini had been whisked off to safety by Hitlerite Blackshirts in cahoots with anti-Semitic factions within the Vatican.