Umberto Eco - Numero Zero

Rating: 2/5

Review:
An unconvincing mish-mash

This is a strange book.  It's a mixture of a treatise on press malpractice and a rather silly conspiracy thriller, and neither works well as a readable book.

There is a sort of Kafka-esque unreality to Numero Zero.  It is narrated by a struggling writer and translator who is recruited to work in Milan on a strange sort of dummy-newspaper whose secret purpose purports to be to allow its proprietor to frighten and effectively blackmail influential people into allowing him access to power.  Much of the book is stilted discussion which reads like the transcript of a Media Studies seminar on shady tabloid tactics.  It's a timely message, but not especially original in its insights and it really doesn't really make for a good novel.

Part of the problem is that it is clunkily structured and a good deal of it is not very well written.  I realise that it is tantamount to sacrilege to say this about Umberto Eco, but I think it's true.  One problem is that huge chunks of carefully structured information for the reader are presented, ridiculously, as spontaneous dialogue.  For example, early on when the narrator is being recruited, we get this exchange with his prospective employer:

"The one who's paying is Commendatore Vimercate.  You'll have heard of him…"

"Vimercate.  I have heard of him.  He ends up in the papers from time to time; he controls a dozen or so hotels on the Adriatic coast, owns a large number of homes for pensioners and the infirm, has various shady dealings about which there's much speculation…" and on and on and on.  It's ridiculously amateurish; no-one would respond spontaneously in that way, and if it were written by a less august author than Eco any decent editor would tell them to go away and do it better. 

There's a lot of this sort of stuff: people telling others things that they already know, dialogue which reads like a sequence of carefully prepared speeches which don't sound like real characters talking to each other at all, and so on.  There's a character who is a bit obsessive about lists and detail who goes on literally for pages listing every detail of various brands of car, or the labyrinthine intricacies of the various orders of the Knights Of Malta.  I would be amazed if anyone actually read all of this carefully – the point has been made after a paragraph or two and I skimmed several pages several times without missing anything important.  Even his exposition of the Conspiracy Theory that Mussolini escaped alive in 1945 is hard going.

The narrator says early on that his own writing is poor because he keeps peppering it with literary references which he knows he shouldn't do – and then carries on doing exactly that throughout the book, allowing Eco to carry on showing off while pretending that he isn't.  And so on.  I found the book increasingly irritating as these things mounted up.

To be fair, this book is trying to make some quite important points, but it doesn't make them very well, I'm afraid.  Thirty years ago I struggled (and skimmed) through the first hundred pages or so of The Name Of the Rose, and then found the rest of the novel gripping, brilliant and very memorable.  A little later I read an interview with  Eco in which he said that he had deliberately made the beginning difficult because he didn't want just anyone reading his book.  That put me off him so much that I haven't read another of his novels until now, and on this evidence I think I've saved myself a good deal of unnecessary suffering. 

I am just an ordinary reader, so Eco may well think that I am not qualified to comment on this, but for me Numero Zero doesn't really work as a novel at all.  The premise doesn't really hang together, it is clumsily done and, frankly, became a chore to finish.  I can't recommend it, I'm afraid.