Numero Zero

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Dan Brown owes a lot to Umberto Eco’s oeuvre, notably “The Name of the Rose”. Did they become friends? Think not, because here Eco trumps him first with a fiendishly complicated tale linking Rome-centered bodies and agencies with fake aristocrats, dodgy financial schemes, freemasonry, what not? And then with his own Mother of All Conspiracies, explaining much of the worldwide mayhem between 1945 and 1992, with all trouble starting in Italy.
The city of Milan holds center stage in both conspiracies. Eco endows it with a mythical past of subterranean pathways and chambers full of skeletons and skulls, even a now built-over canal system à la Amsterdam. With more such details, some going back to Julius Ceasar, he challenges Dan Brown as if saying “Who is the best fantasist, you or me?” Except, just about everything Umberto Eco provides re the Mother, etc. is undisputed fact, firmed up by real evidence. Only the connections and linkages don’t fit, but every reader knows about that, or what? News does not exist, news is made…
Zero numbers are training grounds in publishing, bringing together an assertive editor and a core team of ambitious journalists to create a new format. Desired target groups and impacts are key matters for discussion; if the first issues are successful, investors will pour in capital enabling expansion of the core team. This all happens here, and then, it does not. The recruits for a newly-planned Milanese daily are fourth rate. Colonna (50+) is a self-described loser and charged, amidst other tasks, with writing a book about the rise to fame of this newspaper. That also makes him the one to tell us readers, what really happened.
Eco’s beautiful novel has two storylines covering events between April and June 1992. One follows researcher Braggadocio, a newshound obsessed with reconstructing the interconnections of all evil bedeviling Italy (see above), who regularly unburdens himself to Colonna. The other is the tone and content of the editorial meetings on the new paper, initially designed only for blackmailing (2% of shares) listed companies.
Braggadocio’s breathless conspiracy tales are rather lengthy and not always entertaining. Are they true? See above. The editorial process and discussions are wonderfully described. There is romantics even and readers will enjoy, fall in love even, with Maia. Umberto Eco, now 83, has rewritten postwar history, created an unlikely love affair and engineered a murder to kill a newspaper. And pays homage to many literary authors in a deeply serious book about populist media worldwide, backdated to 1992, in a book also full of humour and hilarious scenes.