Book review

Numero Zero

Here is something completely different. Numero Zero is hard to categorise, probably best just described as a jolly good read. Author Umberto Eco is a prolific writer and philosopher who has written around twenty book divided between fiction, literary criticism and and non fiction. He has been described as ‘Master Story Teller’ which this book confirms.

The story is set in Milan in 1992 where a mysterious backer is setting up a new, and as it proves to be, seedy newspaper. The Editor has drawn together a team of reporters who are busy putting together a dummy run, hence the book’s title. A depressed aging hack, Colonna, has also been employed to record the day to day activity of setting up this paper.

The book is told in the first person, Colonna. The story revolves around four journalists employed to provide the copy, Simei the editor, Braggadocio, Maia and Costanza.

Simei is a nasty piece of work. A gutter journalist who is busy instructing his team in the evil arts of journalism; character smearing, innuendo, quoting out of context, set ups and how to make subsequent denials.

Costanza is enthusiastic about the new paper and endlessly brings up suggestions of subjects which could be covered, only to have Simei give a reason why each will not work or does not fit the proposed profile.

Maia comes from a women’s magazine which featured the lives and loves of film stars and other people who are simply famous for being rich. She had seen this as her chance to move up to real journalism and is bitterly disappointed to find what it was really like.

And finally there was Braggadocio who has a theory that it was Mussolini’s double who had been murdered and that Mussolini was living in South America. He was following this up believing that it would make a perfect front page headline for the inaugural issue.

As an older man Colonna becomes a father figure to who Maia unburdens her disappointments while Braggadocio uses him as a confidante with who he shares his progress on verifying his Mussolini theory, and taps for loans.

The author deftly includes quite a bit of philosophy along the way, Numero Zero is a great story well told. Do not be put off by the rather creepy cover, it’s not that sort of story at all.