One of Umberto Eco's defining features as a writer is his boundless intellect, which allows him to leap nimbly through history and various academic disciplines with infectious glee. His novel Numero Zero is of a piece with the rest of his work, albeit much shorter and more caustic. Unlike the massive historical epics that helped put Eco's name on the map, Numero Zero could easily be classified as a novella. It's remarkable, then, how many big ideas Eco manages to stuff inside of it.
Set in 1992, the book's formal plot involves a hack writer who is hired to help create a newspaper dedicated to extortion and slyly conducted libel. The plot also features a vast conspiracy theory spun by a paranoid reporter working for the newspaper. In The Prague Cemetery, Eco showed he is obsessed with the idea of shadowy events and organizations that underpin our everyday reality. In Numero Zero, the conspiracy sprawls to include both real and implausible ideas, like Mussolini's supposed faked death, the terrorist attacks that plagued Italy during the turbulent '60s and '70s, the controversial Cold War program Operation Gladio and, as ever, the Masons.
In this slim volume, Eco somehow also takes the time to deconstruct media and its reality-warping tendencies. Numero Zero viciously satirizes the forces that go into dishonest news-making as well as the gullible Italian public that eats it up. Eco's criticisms might seem a shade elitist if he didn't take equal time satirizing the truth-seekers who wind up paralyzed by their own paranoia. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books