That incompleteness extends to the characters as well relationships are sometimes unclear and personalities are sketched-in. The book doesn’t always manage to fully plumb those depths in places, it feels less than complete. The satiric potential is high that, combined with Eco’s drily abundant sense of humor, would seem to indicate an interesting direction and some fairly deep-running still waters. The concepts presented are undeniably intriguing, while the base concept of a weaponized fake newspaper is a great one. The notion of a secret truth, of the actual reality behind perceived reality … this is the territory that Eco loves to explore. Drawn into Braggadocio’s web, Colonna and the rest find themselves questioning their own realities.Īnother question: can false information in a false newspaper somehow uncover the truth?Įco is probably best known for “The Name of the Rose,” but “Numero Zero” is more in the realm of something like “Foucault’s Pendulum” – these narratives are built on a foundation of conspiracy and mystery.
However, things become far too real when the aptly-named reporter Braggadocio starts unearthing (or perhaps manufacturing) signs that point to a decades-long conspiracy – one that involves the highest echelons of the Italian government, the Vatican and even Benito Mussolini himself. The paper will only print ghost issues, packed with carefully curated flights of fancy and assorted outlandish theories, so that the publisher might illustrate to the powers that be the blackmail capabilities of such a publication. Our narrator is an Italian journalist by the name of Colonna, a self-described loser who has been recruited to help launch a newspaper that is never to actually be published.Ĭalled “Domani” (“Tomorrow”), this newspaper is intended as a tool for a mysterious communications magnate to finagle his way into the inner circles of power.
This is one of the baseline questions in Umberto Eco’s latest novel, “Numero Zero”, a slim meditation on the nature of the media by way of the Italian author’s usual web of shadowy conspiracies and secret histories.
Is a newspaper that never publishes still a newspaper?
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