Say what? Why write a book for a writer? Why staff a paper at much expense when it’s not really real? And why keep at it when the paper, stuffed with celebrity romances, scandal, and innuendo, is so obviously a vehicle for misinformation-and even blackmail? Those are modest mysteries compared to a larger one that implicates Italian history and society. A hack and ghostwriter, Colonna (whose name means “column”), is long on brains if short on talent as he says, “Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners.…The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.” Ah, if he only knew the half of it, for just when it seems that he has no prospects left, he’s summoned to pen a memoir by a journalist who’s cooking up a Potemkin village of a newsmagazine, funded by a magnate who keeps secret the fact that Domani (tomorrow) will never actually hit the newsstand. The time is June 1992-meaningful to Italian readers as the inauguration of an ostensibly clean period in a notoriously corrupt politics. Working territory much resembling that of Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco ( The Prague Cemetery, 2011, etc.) spins a knotty yarn. This gripping novel from the author of The Name of the Rose is told with all the power of a master storyteller.The sun is shining, the world is spinning, and the great Italian novelist and semiotician has a new book-which means that a conspiracy theory must be afoot somewhere close by. But when a body is found, stabbed to death in a back alley, and the paper is shut down, even he is jolted out of his complacency.įuelled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, love, corruption and murder, Numero Zero reverberates with the clash of forces that have shaped Italy since the Second World War.

There he learns the paranoid theories of Braggadocio, who is convinced that Mussolini's corpse was a body-double and part of a wider Fascist plot.Ĭolonna is sceptical. Colonna takes a job at a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate.

The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy.ġ992, Milan.

Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The gripping new conspiracy thriller by the bestselling author of The Name of the Roseġ945, Lake Como.

Number zero umberto eco