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A review by cartoonmicah
Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
3.0
I’ve been eager and a little daunted to start reading Umberto Eco after learning a bit about his background and the weighty subject matter he deals with in his novels. History, conspiracy, and symbolism dealt with in a darkly humorous way sounds like it would automatically end up on my best reading list, but the fear that it would require the attention necessary to enjoy Borges or Pynchon gave me pause for a time. Maybe The Naming Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum are different, but Numero Zero was not nearly as intellectually overwhelming as I had prepared myself for.
Numero Zero follows a career journalist as he takes on a new job as biographer and assistant editor of a sham newspaper being constructed for a mafioso interested in breaking into the media business. By day, he is teaching the staff the ins and outs of media, showing his writers how to make news and spin anything they find to create suspicion and misdirect the public as they see fit. By night, he is writing a blackmail memoir of the rise of this new newspaper, while falling in love with his young coworker and listening to the ramblings of the most accomplished and paranoid of his reporters. Braggadocio likes to take him out for a drink after work and tell him of the immense conspiracies that underly every aspect of human life. The car companies are out to get us. Though Hitler and Mussolini committed atrocities in the war, their actions and those of the Allies have been altered by the winning parties to tell stories. After a long career chasing leads, he has come to see that everything is a scam and everyone is suspect. And now he’s working on the biggest conspiracy he’s ever uncovered, with ties to the Axis, the Allies, the Vatican, Cold War politics, Italian communists and neofascists, and just about everyone else you can come up with. Everyone has heard him out long enough to know he’s just drinking too much of his own koolaid, until it all becomes startlingly real. If he’s right, what does that mean for those to whom he spilled his guts?
The premise here is much better that the storytelling, in my opinion. Maybe it’s partially due to translation and partially due to the heavy Italian cultural references, but this novel has too much of that late Philip Roth era style to be immersive or enjoyable. It’s a killer premise in outline but you have no desire to root for any of the characters. You can understand them and the distrustful and manipulated world they live in, but you don’t have any investment in the outcome. To some degree, the dark humor reminds me of Vonnegut in Mother Night. It has that post WWII scam gallows outlook with a little less overt irony and comedy.
Good premise, but a little bland on humor and compelling characters. All you end up wanting is to know the final plot trajectory and it’s lightweight at best.
Numero Zero follows a career journalist as he takes on a new job as biographer and assistant editor of a sham newspaper being constructed for a mafioso interested in breaking into the media business. By day, he is teaching the staff the ins and outs of media, showing his writers how to make news and spin anything they find to create suspicion and misdirect the public as they see fit. By night, he is writing a blackmail memoir of the rise of this new newspaper, while falling in love with his young coworker and listening to the ramblings of the most accomplished and paranoid of his reporters. Braggadocio likes to take him out for a drink after work and tell him of the immense conspiracies that underly every aspect of human life. The car companies are out to get us. Though Hitler and Mussolini committed atrocities in the war, their actions and those of the Allies have been altered by the winning parties to tell stories. After a long career chasing leads, he has come to see that everything is a scam and everyone is suspect. And now he’s working on the biggest conspiracy he’s ever uncovered, with ties to the Axis, the Allies, the Vatican, Cold War politics, Italian communists and neofascists, and just about everyone else you can come up with. Everyone has heard him out long enough to know he’s just drinking too much of his own koolaid, until it all becomes startlingly real. If he’s right, what does that mean for those to whom he spilled his guts?
The premise here is much better that the storytelling, in my opinion. Maybe it’s partially due to translation and partially due to the heavy Italian cultural references, but this novel has too much of that late Philip Roth era style to be immersive or enjoyable. It’s a killer premise in outline but you have no desire to root for any of the characters. You can understand them and the distrustful and manipulated world they live in, but you don’t have any investment in the outcome. To some degree, the dark humor reminds me of Vonnegut in Mother Night. It has that post WWII scam gallows outlook with a little less overt irony and comedy.
Good premise, but a little bland on humor and compelling characters. All you end up wanting is to know the final plot trajectory and it’s lightweight at best.