Numero Zero by Umberto Eco (EPUB)

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The worldwide bestselling novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder from the acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery ¶ #1 bestseller in Italy ¶ 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can’t resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor’s paranoid theory that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It’s the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. The evidence? He’s working on it. It’s all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, murder―and clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II, from Mussolini to Berlusconi, that will keep readers turning the pages as the novel’s thrilling plot unfolds.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review New York Times Paperback Row One of Vulture’s “7 Books You Need to Read this November” Included on the Los Angeles Times’s “Holiday Books Roundup” One of Bloomberg Business’s “Eight Books for Your Holiday Reading” One of The Millions “Most Anticipated” from the Second Half of 2015 One of the Sun Herald’s “Ten noteworthy fiction and nonfiction titles on the way” December 2015 Indie Next Pick “Witty and wry…slim in pages but plump in satire about modern Italy…it’s hard not to be charmed by the zest of the author.”—Tom Rachman, New York Times Book Review “Frequently imitated for his amalgamation of intellect, conspiracism, and historical suspense, the author of In the Name of the Rose takes a more contemporary and satirical turn. In 1992, as Italy works to cleanse itself of corruption, a hack journalist is hired to ghostwrite a memoir about a never-to-be-published gossip rag in order to cover up the real rationale for its fakery. Eco’s warped parable is rooted in a very specific time and place, but readers of Elena Ferrante or Rachel Kushner will likely catch the barbs in his clever absurdities.”—Vulture (New York), “7 Books You Need to Read this November” “Colonna, the struggling ghostwriter at the heart of this story, is transfixed by a juicy scoop: that Mussolini was not killed by partisans in 1945, as most believe, but instead survived in hiding. This sly satire, borrowing from outrageous real-life Italian politics, features a larger-than-life leader, conspiracy theories and an almost-corrupt press.”—New York Times, Paperback Row “Numero Zero [is]…a smart puzzle and a delight.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred “Eco combines his delight in suspense with astute political satire in this brainy, funny, neatly lacerating thriller…. Eco’s caustically clever, darkly hilarious, dagger-quick tale of lies, crimes, and collusions condemns the shameless corruption and greed undermining journalism and governments everywhere. A satisfyingly scathing indictment brightened by resolute love.” –Booklist — From the Inside Flap From the best-selling author of The Name of the Rose, an enthralling new conspiracy thriller 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce s death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can t resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor s paranoid theory that Mussolini s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It s the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. The evidence? He s working on it. It s all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, and murder. A clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II from Mussolini to Berlusconi. Farcical, serious, satiric, and tragic (Le Point, France), Numero Zero is the work of a master storyteller.” From the Back Cover From the best-selling author of The Name of the Rose, an enthralling new conspiracy thriller 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can’t resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know the team, he learns of the editor’s paranoid theory that Mussolini’s corpse was a body double and part of a wider Fascist plot. It’s the scoop the newspaper desperately needs. The evidence? He’s working on it. It’s all there: media hoaxes, Mafiosi, the CIA, the Pentagon, blackmail, love, gossip, and murder. A clash of forces that have shaped Italy since World War II—from Mussolini to Berlusconi. “Farcical, serious, satiric, and tragic” (Le Point, France), Numero Zero is the work of a master storyteller. About the Author UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and seven novels, including The Name of the Rose,The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega, was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government, and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 Saturday, June 6, 1992, 8 a.m. No water in the tap this morning. Gurgle, gurgle, two sounds like a baby’s burp, then nothing. I knocked next door: everything was fine there. You must have closed the valve, she said. Me? I don’t even know where it is. Haven’t been here long, you know, don’t get home till late. Good heavens! But don’t you turn off the water and gas when you’re away for a week? Me, no. That’s pretty careless. Let me come in, I’ll show you. She opened the cupboard beneath the sink, moved something, and the water was on. See? You’d turned it off. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Ah, you singles! Exit neighbor: now even she talks English. Keep calm. There are no such things as poltergeists, only in films. And I’m no sleepwalker, but even if I had sleepwalked, I wouldn’t have known anything about the valve or I’d have closed it when I couldn’t sleep, because the shower leaks and I’m always liable to spend the night wide-eyed listening to the dripping, like Chopin at Valldemossa. In fact, I often wake up, get out of bed, and shut the bathroom door so I don’t hear that goddamn drip. It couldn’t have been an electrical contact, could it (it’s a hand valve, it can only be worked by hand), or a mouse, which, even if there was a mouse, would hardly have had the strength to move such a contraption. It’s an old-fashioned tap (everything in this apartment dates back at least fifty years) and rusty besides. So it needed a hand. Humanoid. And I don’t have a chimney down which the Ourang-Outang of Rue Morgue could have climbed. Let’s think. Every effect has its cause, or so they say. We can rule out a miracle ?— ?I can’t see why God would worry about my shower, it’s hardly the Red Sea. So, a natural effect, a natural cause. Last night before going to bed, I took a sleeping pill with a glass of water. Obviously the water was still running then. This morning it wasn’t. So, my dear Watson, the valve had been closed during the night ?— ?and not by you. Someone was in my house, and he, they, were afraid I might have been disturbed, not by the noise they were making (they were silent as the grave) but by the drip, which might have irritated even them, and perhaps they wondered why I didn’t stir. And, very craftily, they did what my neighbor would have done: they turned off the water. And then? My books are in their usual disarray, half the world’s secret services could have gone through them page by page without my noticing. No point looking in the drawers and opening the cupboard in the corridor. If they wanted to make a discovery, there’s only one thing to do these days: rummage through the computer. Perhaps they’d copied everything so as not to waste time and gone back home. And only now, opening and reopening each document, they’d have realized there was nothing in the computer that could possibly interest them. What were they hoping to find? It’s obvious ?— ?I mean, I can’t see any other explanation ?— ?they were looking for something to do with the newspaper. They’re not stupid, they’d have assumed I must have made notes about all the work we are doing in the newsroom ?— ?and therefore that, if I knew anything about the Braggadocio business, I’d have written it down somewhere. Now they’ll have worked out the truth, that I keep everything on a diskette. Last night, of course, they’d also have been to the office and found no diskette of mine. So they’ll be coming to the conclusion (but only now) that I keep it in my pocket. What idiots we are, they’ll be saying, we should have checked his jacket. Idiots? Shits. If they were smart, they wouldn’t have ended up doing such a scummy job. Now they’ll have another go, at least until they arrive at the stolen letter. They’ll arrange for me to be jostled in the street by fake pickpockets. So I’d better get moving before they try again. I’ll send the diskette to a poste restante address and decide later when to pick it up. What on earth am I thinking of, one man is already dead, and Simei has flown the nest. They don’t even need to know if I know, and what I know. They’ll get rid of me just to be on the safe side, and that’s the end of it. I can hardly go around telling the newspapers I knew nothing about the whole business, since just by saying it I’d make it clear I knew what had happened. How did I end up in this mess? I think it’s all the fault of Professor Di Samis and the fact that I know German. What makes me think of Di Samis, a business of decades ago? I’ve always blamed Di Samis for my failure to graduate, and it’s all because I never graduated that I ended up in this mess. And then Anna left me after two years of marriage because she’d come to realize, in her words, that I was a compulsive loser ?— ?God knows what I must have told her at the time to make myself look good. I never graduated due to the fact that I know German. My grandmother came from South Tyrol and made me speak it when I was young. Right from my first year at university I’d taken to translating books from German to pay for my studies. Just knowing German was a profession at the time. You could read and translate books that others didn’t understand (books regarded as important then), and you were paid better than translators from French and even from English. Today I think the same is true of those who know Chinese or Russian. In any event, either you translate or you graduate; you can’t do both. Translation means staying at home, in the warmth or the cold, working in your slippers and learning tons of things in the process. So why go to university lectures? I decided on a whim to register for a German course. I wouldn’t have to study much, I thought, since I already knew it all. The luminary at that time was Professor Di Samis, who had created what the students called his eagle’s nest in a dilapidated Baroque palace where you climbed a grand staircase to reach a large atrium. On one side was Di Samis’s establishment, on the other the aula magna, as the professor pompously called it, a lecture hall with fifty or so seats. You could enter his establishment only if you put on felt slippers. At the entrance there were enough for the assistants and two or three students. Those without slippers had to wait their turn outside. Everything was polished to a high gloss, even, I think, the books on the walls. And even the faces of the elderly assistants who had been waiting their chance for a teaching position from time immemorial. The lecture hall had a lofty vaulted ceiling and Gothic windows (I never understood why, in a Baroque palace) with green stained glass. At the correct time, which is to say at fourteen minutes past the hour, Professor Di Samis emerged from the institute, followed at a distance of one meter by his oldest assistant and at two meters by the younger ones, those under fifty. The oldest assistant carried his books, the younger ones the tape recorder ?— ?tape recorders at that time were still enormous, and looked like a Rolls-Royce. Di Samis covered the ten meters that separated the institute from the hall as though they were twenty: he didn’t follow a straight line but a curve (whether a parabola or an ellipse I’m not sure), proclaiming loudly, “Here we are, here we are!” Then he entered the lecture hall and sat down on a kind of carved podium, waiting to begin with Call me Ishmael. The green light from the stained-glass windows gave a cadaverous appearance to the face that smiled malevolently, as the assistants set up the tape recorder. Then he began: “Contrary to what my valiant colleague Professor Bocardo has said recently . . .” and so on for two hours. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The protagonist and narrator of this novel is Colonna. He’s a self-described loser in his fifties who studied German in college but didn’t graduate because he started working doing translations and ended up writing for insignificant newspapers and ghostwriging. We meet him as he wakes up one day noticing that somebody has turned off his water. This worries him. He suspects that someone may have entered his home and searched through his stuff.He then takes us two months back when he’s approached by someone named Simei with a unique and lucrative job opportunity. Simei wants Colonna to ghostwrite a book for him. As it turns out a commendator, whatever that is, hired Simei to open up a newspaper. Colonna will also be the editor-in-chief. The newspaper is to go after the rich and powerful enemies of the commendator who will present the newspaper to certain individials in the hope that the powerful will end up paying him to close shop to avoid embarrassment. And Simei wants to publish a book about this affair. The chapters of Numero Zero, arranged by day, are mostly about the meetings of the editorial board. There are several other writers but two matter–Bragaddocio and the only female, Maia. These meetings usually start out planning what articles to write but usually end up being about what not to write as Simei shoots down pretty much every idea suggested, especially those by Maia.Colonna of course ends up with the girl, whom others think may be autistic because she can only conceive what is in her head but manages to turn Colonna into someone who thinks like her. We learn how their relationship develops over time.Bragaddocio is key. He’s somewhat paranoid or at least very skeptic about everything. He’s working on some research. He needs a car but no car will do because no car is perfect and on top of that, car marketing tends to suppress important data about cars, so he thinks there something of a conspiracy going on by car manufacturers, marketers, and the media.Bragaddocio later reveals to Colonna what he’s working on–a theory that Mussolini didn’t die as we history tells, but rather it was a double that was killed and whose corpse was desecrated by the masses and hung. What sounds initially rather farfetched, Bragaddocio manages to make pretty convincing given all the strange characters, even stranger events, the unknowns, the inaccuracies and missing info at the time.Whenever we talk about these leaders not dying as we are told, the next issue becomes their triumphant return to power. And Bragaddocio has that also thought through. It borrows from history to make the implausible probable, namely it bases this plan around to return Mussolini to power on the real-life, admitted, and recognized false-flag operation Gladio. Gladio wasn’t just some single false-flag operation but an entire infrastructure and organization to carry out false-flags as needed.Suddenly there is a mysterious death in the group. And now we are back at the beginning of the book with Colonna adopting Bragaddocio’s paranoia.Numero Zero is Eco’s shortest novel. Some of the typical Eco themes are missing: wars, history of Paris, esotericism, play with languages. We do get though some history of Milan and the episode of Mussolini’s death and the strange aftermath and fate of his corpse. This is interesting and enlightening stuff, as is the political climate in Italy during the cold war when Gladio was concocted. This is Eco’s last book and he poignantly focuses a lot on death and the dead. Perhaps Numero Zero also represents a criticism of the media, while this prospective newspaper is rather an extreme possibility, one can’t set aside the sense that what Eco presents may very well be how editorial decisions are made everywhere. Here we have the shadowy figure of the commendatore and Simei has to worry about what might be agreeable or disagreeable to his interests. Regular newspapers have to worry about what may the interests of owners, advertisers, or just the good old establishment. Another concern is the reader–and Simei has a very poor perception of readers and what interests them. Simei thinks he has to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or perhaps even below that, both in content and style. His newspaper wouldn’t be just about informing but also manipulating.The political aspect here is the strongest. Eco does a good job presenting the establishment critic who starts out with some sensible ideas but ends up taking it further and further until whatever truth there was is buried in a bunch of stuff bordering on nonsense, which of course invalidates his every argument. The topic of false flags will always be of interest as long as strange, unique, puzzling, powerful, and unlikely events happen that receive poor, unsatisfying, incomplete and and also unlikely explanations by the establishment–perhaps on purpose. He could have gone further with it but Eco has always been unnecessary careful.

⭐Not as good, or long, as Eco’s other works. The hallmarks of Econian fiction are there: conspiracies, or possible conspiracies, “Diabolicals,” thorough take-downs of how do we know what we know. Epistemology and semiotics. And, of course, there is Eco’s fascination with Italy’s Fascist past and the Second World War weaved in. I will say, without giving anything away, this does have the happiest ending for a protagonist I can recall in Eco’s fiction, while absolutely putting down Italy’s newspaper industry, government, and economy, to the point of predicting Italy will devolve into a third world pit.

⭐I find it impossible to review this book without referring to other books by Umberto Eco. Specifically, their is a vibe here that’s somewhat reminiscent of “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” (in that there are countless cultural references that may not escape the shores of a long-gone Italy) and the much more developed “Foucault’s Pendulum” (which for my money is the film version Hollywood should have made and dropped Tom Hanks into instead of “The DaVinci Code.”) “Numero Zero” is by rights a novella, clocking in at a slim 191 pages (including a number of white pages separating chapters). The plot is interesting enough, but only gets cooking in the final quarter of the book. That’s when the murders begin and the heroes come under a shadowy threat (as in Foucault’s). Here, though, the threat is so slight and dissipates so quickly, that it’s merely a minor plot point. Beyond that, the reader is invited to chew over much-deserved insults flung at the media, a phone book of international intriguers, and revisit Italian corruption circa 1992. The big reveal — if that’s what it is — also dissipates quickly, offering sort of a coda to a dark chapter in history. Don’t get me wrong. Eco at 84 out-writes authors of 750-page tomes who are a third his age. Having said that, this book, I feel, is best approached as if it were a quick introduction to Eco, whetting the appetite for a number of his better works, including “Name of the Rose,” “Foucault’s Pendulum,” “Baudolino,” and “The Island of the Day Before.” Again, I stress that even a lesser Eco book beats most other books any day.

⭐I have had the privilege of reading all of Eco’s books, that are not essays and deal in more academic matters, like his work in semiotics (I tried reading a couple of those, but the subject matter proves to be too esoteric). This book does not have the gravitas or the Roberto Bolano magnum opus-esque feel of The Foucault’s Pendulum or the Name of the Rose, but it definitely reads great and is a palpitating read, from cover to cover. As several reviewers have noted, the book is replete with many references that were fun to look up and examine and Eco succeeds in sometimes blurring the line between reality and fantasy, and perhaps that is his goal. Although this book would be more palatable to the reader of, say, Dan Brown novels, Eco still maintains his sharp wit, his power of observation and the great internal dialogue, at times prosaic, at times philosophical, that characterizes his protagonists in the aforementioned works. Overall, it was a pleasure to read and the only regret is that the man himself is not among us anymore to grace us with more of his books. For anyone looking for a tangential follow up work, not by Eco, but on a topic that he greatly enjoyed, Italian cuisine, try https://www.amazon.com/Italians-Love-Talk-About-Food/dp/0374289948 Why Italians Love to Talk About Food.

⭐A great novel and a quick read. Umberto’s classic style of a wealth of hidden concepts and ideas cleverly interwoven into a mystery. Sad that he is no longer with us, but it’s evident that he was an avid semiologist. Great book

⭐Enjoyable book and well written as ever from Umberto Eco but quite short and certainly not one of his greater works

⭐Still, it did help me while away a few hours on holiday. Try reading The Name of the Rose instead.

⭐This book, though good, does not reach the heights of Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day before however it is a thoroughly enjoyable ‘conspiracy’ through Italy’s chaotic post-war history.

⭐Odd little book. Short. No plot or characterisation to speak of. I’d been told it was evocative of a particular era in Italian history, but it wasn’t at all (and I lived there at the time). Avoid.

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