Early on in Numero Zero, Umberto Eco’s protagonist surmises, ‘If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.’

Eco’s protagonist, Colonna, a self-deprecating but nonetheless propitious ghostwriter finds himself at the heart of a faux-tabloid newspaper in Milan in 1992, bankrolled and conceived by a mysterious benefactor as a bargaining chip for access to the inner sanctum of finance and politics. Ultimately, Colonna is drawn into an unravelling mystery and haunted by the resurrected spectre of Mussolini, that even his lack of belief in himself cannot extricate him from.

While the mood, the paranoid protagonist, and subject matter are reminiscent of Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, the similarities end there. Numero Zero doesn’t have the brooding energy or twists of The Conformist, or the intertextuality, depth and interest in tabula rasa, memory and perception seen in Eco’s earlier works The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana or In the Name of the Rose, however it does recount an interesting time in Italy’s history, with the advent of stay-behind, the CIA, NATO, Gladio and secret services.

Eco writes well and fluidly, and Numero Zero is a tightly packed, quick read. The fake newspaper premise allows Eco to divulge the tricks of cheap journalism: the art of denial, the propensity for insinuation, conjecture, even the freedoms of being able to construct obituaries and horoscopes for a disdained and imaginary ‘readership’. Consequently, one wonders if the underlying commentary is more about Berlusconi’s media empire during his time as the longest-serving post-war prime minister of Italy, even if the novel is set two years before his rise to power.

However, it is difficult to tell what Eco desired to convey with this novel. Part middle-aged love story, part media critique and conspiracy theory, the result is a satirical and entertaining novel from an accomplished author who is consciously hovering on the surface of a larger conversation.

Anaya Latter