Numero zero

About 90% of the way through, I had to pull up Wikipedia and check the publication date against Eco's biography. Was this one of those posthumously published unfinished works, such as Wallace's Pale King? No, Eco was still alive when this came out, so it seems to have been the novel he intended to publish.

Looking back on this novel, I find myself thinking of a snake swallowing an elephant. (Apologies to Saint-Exupéry.) Much of the fascination is wondering how the snake is going to pull that off. The snake in this example is the novel, Numero Zero, and the elephant is, well, pretty much all that stuff that shows up on the jacket: Operation Gladio, Mussolini, Licio Gelli, La Cosa Nostra, the CIA, right-wing death squads, the Cold War, etc. To avoid further belaboring this questionable metaphor, let's just say the snake puts up a good show but just as it unhinges its jaws and looks like it's going to get to swallowing, it takes one last look at the elephant, does whatever snakes do to shrug, and slinks off.

So, the novel isn't really about any of that, though there's enough of that included to form the basis of a paranoid thriller. What it's really about is a middle-aged academic who gets involved with a start-up newspaper in early 1990s Italy. One might say hi-jinx ensue, though these are principally of the low-stakes variety. While it feels slight compared to his other denser, more intellectually challenging works, the story was pleasant and managed to it at least one familiar Eco theme: how symbols are manipulated to create meaning.