This witty and wry novel — Eco’s sixth since
his best-selling fiction debut, “The Name of the Rose” — also contains a few
flimsy elements and peculiar digressions. Still, it’s hard not to be charmed by
the zest of the author. I imagine the gray-bearded 83-year-old professor
chortling away as he typed in some book-lined sanctuary. (Eco boasts 30,000
volumes at his Milan apartment, 20,000 more at a country home outside Urbino.)
The narrator of “Numero Zero” is a
50-ish sad sack, Colonna, who dropped out of college and has flitted from job
to job: tutor, hack journalist, proofreader, copy editor, slush-pile reader,
even ghostwriter of detective fiction for a pseudonymous author — that is, he’s
too unimportant even to be the real fake. Lately, he works in Milan at a
start-up newspaper that is preparing dummy issues, chiefly with the intent of
blackmailing the powerful. When a muckraking colleague claims to have unearthed
a political conspiracy, all goes awry. So what’s the dynamite scoop?
Eco reveals it, but not in a hurry. First, he
savors his fiasco of a newspaper — the kind that hears of a weeping Madonna
statue and orders a banner headline. The unscrupulous editor in chief, Simei,
informs his staff that their target audience is nitwits. Crossword clues must
be no more challenging than “The husband of Eve.”
The publication is named Domani for its intent to stay aloof to daily
news in favor of tomorrow’s stories. But soothsaying — tricky enough for paid
psychics, and in especially short supply among the punditocracy — is simpler if
you already know what will happen. So, Simei has the inspired idea of
backdating the mock-ups, permitting the journalists to fill their articles with
ex post facto insights.
The setting for these inky
shenanigans is 1992, when the Clean Hands scandal broke, revealing a system of
kickbacks that implicated much of the Italian establishment. Political parties
collapsed, thousands of people were arrested and a few committed suicide. From
the chaos emerged a wealthy Milanese entrepreneur, Silvio Berlusconi, who formed
his own party the next year and was elected prime minister in 1994, proclaiming
himself savior of a vitiated nation.
The novel never mentions him by name. However, the owner of Domani is
described as an ambitious businessman known by his honorific, Il Commendatore,
who aims to leverage media power into access to the upper echelons. (Opponents
of Berlusconi, who is commonly known by his title, Il Cavaliere, have long
accused him of applying his vast media holdings to political ends.)
As scandal grips the nation, Colonna
is occupied with the scoop of his seedy colleague Braggadocio, who claims that
Mussolini was not killed by partisans in 1945 but survived in hiding, and that
the dictator’s fate was linked to extremist political violence in postwar Italy.
In a crescendo of conspiratorial thinking, Braggadocio links a series of
notorious crimes and alleged plots, each still debated in Italy: the Piazza
Fontana bombing, the murder of Aldo Moro, the sudden death of Pope John Paul I,
the Vatican banking scandal, the P2 Masonic lodge, the shooting of Pope John
Paul II.
Conspiracies — many faked, some veritable —
have long enthralled Eco, from “The Name of the Rose” (1980), set in a medieval
abbey where monks keep getting bumped off; to “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988),
about three book editors who invent a conspiracy theory that gets out of
control; to his previous novel, “The Prague Cemetery” (2010), a portrait of a
19th-century malefactor who creates a notorious anti-Semitic forgery.
Eco’s predilection for cryptic truths traces back to his other career as
a distinguished professor of semiotics, a branch of humanities whose
practitioners are cursed to spend their lives explaining to strangers what they
do. A central aim of the field is the deconstruction of human communications,
reckoning with the unspoken codes and signification around us, from advertising
to eating to the movies. Meanings are hidden everywhere, they argue — a view not
far from that of the conspiracy theorist. Which is not to equate scholars with
cranks. Only to note that Eco is professionally attuned to clandestine
meanings, and to the risk of overinterpretation.
Another cause of Eco’s
conspiratorial bent, I suspect, is Italy itself, where politicos have indulged
in skulduggery since long before Machiavelli. Where conspiracies really do
exist, is one nuts to expect them? When I arrived as a journalist in Italy a
decade after Clean Hands, I was startled to discover that some people
considered the villains of that scandal not the prosecuted but the prosecutors.
Berlusconi himself routinely referred to the judiciary as flush with Reds
plotting against conservatives like himself.
In the most stable of countries, scandals lead to disgrace, contrition
(sincere or not) and resignations. In Italy, scandals are where history
bifurcates, with parallel lines of explanation never to meet, disputed guilt,
no crashing end and little regeneration as a result.
“Numero Zero” suggests that the interminable Italian political arguments
over responsibility and blame trace back to World War II. “The shadow of
Mussolini, who is taken for dead, wholly dominates Italian events from 1945
until, I’d say, now,” Braggadocio remarks. Of course, he’s a paranoiac. But is
he wrong? Still today, Fascist and Communist graffiti blights walls across
Italy, and Rome retains a prominent obelisk chiseled with the name of Il Duce.
Imagine a Nazi-era tribute to Hitler in central Berlin today — it’s
inconceivable. But in the Italian political opera, there are few finales, just
encores nobody asked for.
Bogus or not, Braggadocio’s conspiracy theorizing leads to blood, which
is perhaps Eco’s point: Fantastic claims have real costs. When Colonna feels
imperiled, he takes to the arms of his young love interest, Maia. And she —
previously a character more quirky than plausible — gains full voice, railing
against the chicanery everywhere. “The only serious concern for decent citizens
is how to avoid paying taxes, and those in charge can do what they like — they
always have their snouts in the same trough.” She proposes running away to an
even more corrupt country, where the venality will at least be in the open.
Colonna retorts that there’s no need to venture far. “You’re forgetting,
my love, that Italy is slowly turning into one of those havens you want to
banish yourself to,” he says. “All we have to do is wait: Once this country of
ours has finally joined the third world, the living will be easy.”
Remember, this is 1992, when dirty hands were
exposed and cleaner hands were to follow; all those perp walks and prison terms
presaged a better domani . Enter stage right a dapper gent with a few
trillion lire in his pocket and a satisfied grin on his chops. Berlusconi
dominated Italian politics from 1994 until 2011, serving as prime minister
three times. The Italy that he was to rescue is today one of dejection,
unemployment, cynicism. Wanting to laugh, the impish Eco — along with many of
his compatriots — is inclined to sigh at the state of his nation.
NUMERO ZERO
By Umberto Eco
Translated by Richard
Dixon
191 pp. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. $24.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/umberto-ecos-numero-zero.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=Sunday%20Book%20Review®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
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