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. This gripping story from the author of The Name Of The Rose is told with all the power of a master storyteller.Is a newspaper that never publishes still a newspaper? Fuelled by media hoaxes, Mafiosi, love, gossip and murder, Numero Zero reverberates with the clash of the cynical forces that have shaped Italy since the last days of World War II. 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. As Colonna gets to know the team of journalists, 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. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. Colonna, a depressed writer picking up hack work, is offered a fee he can't refuse to ghost-write a memoir.
The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy.
Mussolini and his mistress are captured by local partisans and shot in a summary execution. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★4 Reviews Sign in to write a reviewġ945, Lake Como. Umberto Eco (author), Richard Dixon (translator)
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