Numero zero

Review by New York Times Review

THE END OF PLENTY: The Race to Feed a Crowded World, by Joel K. Bourne Jr. (Norton, $16.95.) The world's population is on track to outpace the food supplies on which it depends for survival - a catastrophe that Malthus famously predicted in a seminal essay in the late 1700s, well before the advent of agricultural developments that have accelerated food production. Bourne, an environmental journalist, outlines the efforts of farmers and scientists around the world who are attempting to right the balance. THE SEASON OF MIGRATION, by Nellie Hermann. (Picador, $16.) Hermann's novel focuses on 10 months of Vincent van Gogh's life, starting in 1878, when he ministered to a small mining town in Belgium. His ecclesiastical career stalled, but his time among the miners exposed him to an emotional clarity that later influenced his paintings. The book "is best apprehended not as a conventional novel but as a portrait of a crisis," our reviewer, Leah Hager Cohen, wrote. MULTIPLE CHOICE, by Alejandro Zambra. Translated by Megan McDowell. (Penguin, $15.) Zambra's earlier collection of short stories, "My Documents," showed the author "knows how to turn the familiar inside out, but he also knows how to wrap us up in it," Natasha Wimmer wrote here. This present book, written in the format of a standardized test, is based on the national aptitude tests Chilean students take before applying to universities and poses a series of questions with no right answers. NUMERO ZERO, by Umberto Eco. Translated by Richard Dixon. (Mariner, $14.95.) Colonna, the struggling ghostwriter at the heart of this story, is transfixed by a juicy scoop: that Mussolini was not killed by partisans in 1945, as most believe, but instead survived in hiding. This sly satire, borrowing from outrageous real-life Italian politics, features a larger-than-life leader, conspiracy theories and an almost-corrupt press. DEAR MR. YOU, by Mary-Louise Parker. (Scribner, $16.) This epistolary work is composed of a series of unsent letters addressed to men, fictional and real, from various periods in the author's life. Her recipients include an amalgam of three bad boyfriends folded into a composite character called Cerberus; in another letter, addressed to a future boyfriend for her daughter, she writes, "Make her drunk on happy." CITY ON FIRE, by Garth Risk Hallberg. (Vintage, $17.) Artists and lost children are at the heart of this sprawling debut novel, which our reviewer, Frank Rich, called a "Dickens-size descent" into a bygone New York in the late 1970s, with the citywide blackout in 1977 as a centerpiece of the story. HOLD STILL: A Memoir With Photographs, by Sally Mann. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) The photographer, known for intimate images of her children, reflects on her Southern childhood and upbringing and the call to photography, weaving her drawings and other works into this lyrical account.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1   Saturday, June 6, 1992, 8 a.m.   No water in the tap this morning.   Gurgle, gurgle, two sounds like a baby's burp, then nothing.   I knocked next door: everything was fine there. You must have closed the valve, she said. Me? I don't even know where it is. Haven't been here long, you know, don't get home till late. Good heavens! But don't you turn off the water and gas when you're away for a week? Me, no. That's pretty careless. Let me come in, I'll show you.   She opened the cupboard beneath the sink, moved something, and the water was on. See? You'd turned it off. Sorry, I wasn't thinking. Ah, you singles! Exit neighbor: now even she talks English.   Keep calm. There are no such things as poltergeists, only in films. And I'm no sleepwalker, but even if I had sleepwalked, I wouldn't have known anything about the valve or I'd have closed it when I couldn't sleep, because the shower leaks and I'm always liable to spend the night wide-eyed listening to the dripping, like Chopin at Valldemossa. In fact, I often wake up, get out of bed, and shut the bathroom door so I don't hear that goddamn drip.   It couldn't have been an electrical contact, could it (it's a hand valve, it can only be worked by hand), or a mouse, which, even if there was a mouse, would hardly have had the strength to move such a contraption. It's an old-fashioned tap (everything in this apartment dates back at least fifty years) and rusty besides. So it needed a hand. Humanoid. And I don't have a chimney down which the Ourang-Outang of Rue Morgue could have climbed.   Let's think. Every effect has its cause, or so they say. We can rule out a miracle ?-- ?I can't see why God would worry about my shower, it's hardly the Red Sea. So, a natural effect, a natural cause. Last night before going to bed, I took a sleeping pill with a glass of water. Obviously the water was still running then. This morning it wasn't. So, my dear Watson, the valve had been closed during the night ?-- ?and not by you. Someone was in my house, and he, they, were afraid I might have been disturbed, not by the noise they were making (they were silent as the grave) but by the drip, which might have irritated even them, and perhaps they wondered why I didn't stir. And, very craftily, they did what my neighbor would have done: they turned off the water.   And then? My books are in their usual disarray, half the world's secret services could have gone through them page by page without my noticing. No point looking in the drawers and opening the cupboard in the corridor. If they wanted to make a discovery, there's only one thing to do these days: rummage through the computer. Perhaps they'd copied everything so as not to waste time and gone back home. And only now, opening and reopening each document, they'd have realized there was nothing in the computer that could possibly interest them.   What were they hoping to find? It's obvious ?-- ?I mean, I can't see any other explanation ?-- ?they were looking for something to do with the newspaper. They're not stupid, they'd have assumed I must have made notes about all the work we are doing in the newsroom ?-- ?and therefore that, if I knew anything about the Braggadocio business, I'd have written it down somewhere. Now they'll have worked out the truth, that I keep everything on a diskette. Last night, of course, they'd also have been to the office and found no diskette of mine. So they'll be coming to the conclusion (but only now) that I keep it in my pocket. What idiots we are, they'll be saying, we should have checked his jacket. Idiots? Shits. If they were smart, they wouldn't have ended up doing such a scummy job.   Now they'll have another go, at least until they arrive at the stolen letter. They'll arrange for me to be jostled in the street by fake pickpockets. So I'd better get moving before they try again. I'll send the diskette to a poste restante address and decide later when to pick it up. What on earth am I thinking of, one man is already dead, and Simei has flown the nest. They don't even need to know if I know, and what I know. They'll get rid of me just to be on the safe side, and that's the end of it. I can hardly go around telling the newspapers I knew nothing about the whole business, since just by saying it I'd make it clear I knew what had happened.   How did I end up in this mess? I think it's all the fault of Professor Di Samis and the fact that I know German.       What makes me think of Di Samis, a business of decades ago? I've always blamed Di Samis for my failure to graduate, and it's all because I never graduated that I ended up in this mess. And then Anna left me after two years of marriage because she'd come to realize, in her words, that I was a compulsive loser ?-- ?God knows what I must have told her at the time to make myself look good.   I never graduated due to the fact that I know German. My grandmother came from South Tyrol and made me speak it when I was young. Right from my first year at university I'd taken to translating books from German to pay for my studies. Just knowing German was a profession at the time. You could read and translate books that others didn't understand (books regarded as important then), and you were paid better than translators from French and even from English. Today I think the same is true of those who know Chinese or Russian. In any event, either you translate or you graduate; you can't do both. Translation means staying at home, in the warmth or the cold, working in your slippers and learning tons of things in the process. So why go to university lectures?   I decided on a whim to register for a German course. I wouldn't have to study much, I thought, since I already knew it all. The luminary at that time was Professor Di Samis, who had created what the students called his eagle's nest in a dilapidated Baroque palace where you climbed a grand staircase to reach a large atrium. On one side was Di Samis's establishment, on the other the aula magna, as the professor pompously called it, a lecture hall with fifty or so seats.   You could enter his establishment only if you put on felt slippers. At the entrance there were enough for the assistants and two or three students. Those without slippers had to wait their turn outside. Everything was polished to a high gloss, even, I think, the books on the walls. And even the faces of the elderly assistants who had been waiting their chance for a teaching position from time immemorial.   The lecture hall had a lofty vaulted ceiling and Gothic windows (I never understood why, in a Baroque palace) with green stained glass. At the correct time, which is to say at fourteen minutes past the hour, Professor Di Samis emerged from the institute, followed at a distance of one meter by his oldest assistant and at two meters by the younger ones, those under fifty. The oldest assistant carried his books, the younger ones the tape recorder ?-- ?tape recorders at that time were still enormous, and looked like a Rolls-Royce.   Di Samis covered the ten meters that separated the institute from the hall as though they were twenty: he didn't follow a straight line but a curve (whether a parabola or an ellipse I'm not sure), proclaiming loudly, "Here we are, here we are!" Then he entered the lecture hall and sat down on a kind of carved podium, waiting to begin with Call me Ishmael.   The green light from the stained-glass windows gave a cadaverous appearance to the face that smiled malevolently, as the assistants set up the tape recorder. Then he began: "Contrary to what my valiant colleague Professor Bocardo has said recently . . ." and so on for two hours. Excerpted from Numero Zero by Umberto Eco All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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