The narrative then shifts to the past tense, where Colonna relates the story of his time at the newspaper and the conspiracy theory that Braggadocio relates to him. He surmises that an intruder, worried that the dripping tap would wake Colonna and alert him to their presence, turned off the water to search the house in silence. He is in his house, obsessing over the fact that his water has been switched off during the night. The novel is written entirely in the first person and is structured so that in the opening passage, written in the present tense, the narrator, Colonna comes across as completely paranoid. While Eco is well known for his complex plots, the length of Numero Zero perhaps isn’t as conducive to the layered conspiracies at work in The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum, but the weaving through of history, conspiracy, and the kind of self-fulfilling or self-created conspiracy familiar to Eco readers, still makes for an interesting entanglement.
The conspiracy being played out behind the scenes of this newspaper crosses over to the conspiracy that the journalist Braggadocio believes he has uncovered in relation to the death of Mussolini a conspiracy which has, according to Braggadocio, guided the course of Italian history since the end of World War II. Both the memoir and the newspaper itself, then, are fictions, manufactured with ulterior motives in mind. Simei suspects that the newspaper is actually being used as a means for the financier to gain access into the higher echelons of the finance and business worlds he aspires to and will be closed when he has reached his goal. The memoir that Simei wants Colonna to write would tell the story of a newspaper of great integrity getting shut down due to pressures from a corrupt society. The title of the book refers to the dummy issues of the newspaper that they will be producing to showcase their work as a new kind of newspaper one that will report not what has happened, but what will happen tomorrow. Simei is setting up a new paper, Domani (Tomorrow), which is to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As such, it is perhaps one of his most accessible books and something that I was able to enjoy in one sitting.Ĭolonna, an over-the-hill writer and journalist, and a self-confessed loser, is offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a memoir for the newspaper editor, Simei. Umberto Eco’s final novel is a fast-paced historical thriller centred on a newspaper that will never be published, and a conspiracy theory surrounding the death of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.Īt just under 200 pages, Numero Zero is the shortest of Eco’s novels by a considerable margin.
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