![]() ![]() Nonetheless, where the book is at its considerable best is its angry and persuasive depiction of the essential rottenness of post-war Italian politics. Not all the tangents he goes off on-sports-car specifications, fraudulent orders of chivalry-are as rewarding as he seems to think. What follows, again not for the first time, is a combination of a conventional thriller and a whole lot of other stuff that Eco wants us to know about. (In Eco’s hands, this becomes surprisingly convincing.) Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he cant resist to ghostwrite a memoir. The precise circumstances of Il Duces death remain controversial. Instead, that famously disfigured corpse belonged to somebody else, while Il Duce himself was smuggled to Argentina. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The latest book, like many of its predecessors, is based around a conspiracy theory-in this case, rather a good one. There’s still plenty to enjoy and at an unusually slim 200 pages, Numero Zero is also a pretty effortless way for new Eco readers to see what all the fuss is about. Ever since The Name of the Rose conquered the world in the 1980s, every new Umberto Eco novel has been a fully-fledged literary event-without any quite matching the sustained brilliance of that debut. ![]()
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