Umberto Eco’s ‘Numero Zero’
By TOM RACHMAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOV. 20, 2015
Umberto Eco’s early novels gained a reputation
as intellectual entertainments, dense with esoterica and dotted with Latin, of
a heft you’d rather not drop on your toe. By contrast, his new conspiracy
thriller is a fleet volume, slim in pages but plump in satire about modern
Italy.
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.
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