Numero zero

Famed author of riddling intellectual mysteries and sophisticated, hard-hitting essays, Eco combines his delight in suspense with astute political satire in this brainy, funny, neatly lacerating thriller. Colonna, a demoralized hack journalist and ghost writer of detective stories, is certain on this otherwise typical June day in Milan in 1992 that his life is now in danger. We learn why in rapid-fire flashbacks that illuminate his new, lucrative if dodgy gig helping launch a fake newspaper titled Domani, or Tomorrow. Colanna and company, including smart and witty Maia, are creating a dozen zero issues that a shady media tycoon (slyly modeled on Silvio Berlusconi) will use to blackmail members of Italy's inner sanctum of finance and politics. This diabolical, convoluted scheme spawns a tangle of complicated, macabre, and perilous conspiracy theories involving a Mussolini body double, the Vatican, Argentina, terrorists, the CIA, even Forest Rangers. 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist

At the heart of Eco's short, satiric novel beats a rant against contemporary journalism and the suspicion-rich, fact-poor culture it nurtures. In 1992, Colonna-a 50ish university dropout who ekes out a living as a hack journalist/manuscript reviewer/proofreader/fact-checker-is hired by Milan editor Simei to help produce sample issues of a proposed (mock) newspaper underwritten by an ambitious hotel and nursing home magnate for his private use. Colonna's new job includes ghostwriting Simei's book about the newspaper experiment, for his own purposes. At editorial meetings, the newspaper's six reporters are taught such journalistic techniques as dumbing down, grouping stories to suggest worrisome themes, responding to complaints by casting aspersions on the complainer, quoting sources real and imaginary, and slanting news while maintaining an objective posture. As the newspaper takes shape, Colonna becomes romantically involved with Maia, the horoscope writer, and befriends Bragadaccio. Formerly a magazine freelancer for What They Don't Tell Us, Bragadaccio is obsessed with the idea that Mussolini is alive, well, and living in Argentina, with the coverup connecting the CIA, a right-wing/Catholic conspiracy, and sundry government scandals. For Eco (The Prague Cemetery), 20th-century history is a mud river beneath Italian society, creating sinkholes for truth and principle. Historical fiction still inspires his best writing, but while romance and humor have never been his forte, they are both credible here. Unfortunately, the promise of a psychological/political thriller remains unfulfilled. As fact and fiction merge into mystery, Eco offers fewer clues than in his masterwork, The Name of the Rose, but no William of Baskerville to solve the puzzle. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The sun is shining, the world is spinning, and the great Italian novelist and semiotician has a new bookwhich means that a conspiracy theory must be afoot somewhere close by. Working territory much resembling that of Foucault's Pendulum, Eco (The Prague Cemetery, 2011, etc.) spins a knotty yarn. The time is June 1992meaningful to Italian readers as the inauguration of an ostensibly clean period in a notoriously corrupt politics. A hack and ghostwriter, Colonna (whose name means "column"), is long on brains if short on talent; as he says, "Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners.The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong." Ah, if he only knew the half of it, for just when it seems that he has no prospects left, he's summoned to pen a memoir by a journalist who's cooking up a Potemkin village of a newsmagazine, funded by a magnate who keeps secret the fact that Domani (tomorrow) will never actually hit the newsstand. Say what? Why write a book for a writer? Why staff a paper at much expense when it's not really real? And why keep at it when the paper, stuffed with celebrity romances, scandal, and innuendo, is so obviously a vehicle for misinformationand even blackmail? Those are modest mysteries compared to a larger one that implicates Italian history and society. Suffice it to say that much of the brouhaha concerns a certain baldheaded, square-jawed former dictator who brought Italy to ruin long before Colonna's wheels ever started spinning, overlapping into the seamy sordidness of the Tangentopoli, or "bribegate," of the narrative present. For all that, Eco draws in contemporary political figures, and dead popes, and assassination attempts, and terrorists, and banking scandalswell, it helps to know a bit about recent Italian history to keep up with what's going on, especially when it's often turned on its head. But then, to read Eco well, it helps to know about everything. Not quite as substantial as The Name of the Rose but a smart puzzle and a delight all the same. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.