The existence of the newspaper is a sham. Colonna gets a fortuitous and somewhat murky contract to ghostwrite a book for Simei, the slippery editor in chief of an about-to-be-launched, avant-garde newspaper Domani. The protagonist of Numero Zero is a washed up two-bit hack, Dottor Colonna. His remarkable ingenuity to chain together disparate events turns up the groove. But, much to my pleasure, Eco stays true to historical events.
Strings of the story, however, go back to the mysterious death of Il duce, Benito Mussolini and his mistress at Lake Como in 1945.Īt first, I thought that Numero Zero will take the alternate history route. The events unfold in Milan of the early ’90s. Numero Zero, though a less eruditory affair, remains high on tension and intelligence quotient just like Eco’s other books. His fixation with conspiracy theories, cabals and camarillas, together with his formal vocation in semiotics, I believe, led to his dexterity in both fiction and non-fiction. Unlike his previous novels, Numero Zero is the slimmest in volume, 191 pages to be precise, and also the one with a rather non-convoluted plot, at least in relative capacity.Įco’s stunning grasp of the medieval culture has always amazed me. Most met with success, though none could set the bar higher than his debut novel.Įco’s genius lay in not only constructing beautiful narratives but also in craftily deploying historical facts laced with the fiction of conspiracy theories and media hoaxes. The next three decades witnessed Eco write one seminal book after another. Numero Zero happens to be his seventh work of fiction.Ī towering figure of Italian literature, Eco arrived on the scene in the ’80s with his debut, best-selling novel The Name of the Rose. U mberto Eco passed away in 2016 leaving behind an astounding intellectual legacy of unsurpassed depth.
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