Reading from our own vantage, we know it’s doomed, of course, and Eco has a lot of fun with layers of short-sightedness and some score-settling knifework upon the Italian newspaper industry as well as the obvious media mogul targets. Almost in the manner of Bigend’s “Node” in Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, an unseen actor is creating a sequence of dummy runs of a newspaper in order to practise causing effects upon the power structures of the day. It’s a short and sweet little book, like a tiny aftershock from FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, set in the early 1990s and concerning a newspaper that doesn’t exist. If you know me at all, you know I have unholy love for Eco’s work, fiction and non-fiction. GradeSaver, 24 February 2018 Web.NUMERO ZERO was the final Umberto Eco novel. Next Section Numero Zero Summary How To Cite in MLA Format Sexton, Timothy. Will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. You can help us out by revising, improving and updatingĪfter you claim a section you’ll have 24 hours to send in a draft. One reviewer put this critique into the context of writing a film with the suggestion that Eco’s first six novel are like watching a film whereas his seventh is more akin to reading the screenplay treatment for those films. Perhaps due to the curtailed length of this novel in compared to the far more expansive length of his previous works, one of the most prevalent criticisms of Numero Zero is it seems less complete than the typical Eco work.

Covering world events from just after World War II to the explosion of extreme domestic terrorism which rocked Italian society in the early 1970s, the book is pitches at a darkly ironic satirical tone with the focus of its barbs primarily directed toward the influence of the tabloid press which increased significantly over that same period. Like Eco's more familiar novels, however, Numero Zero does contain a narrative that is driven by conspiracy theories and historical fact.

Unlike Eco’s most famous novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, Numero Zero is short and relatively fast-paced with its less than 200 pages stripped of long and intricate digressions and the dense historical background and language games which characterizes the author’s previous fiction. Numero Zero is Umberto Eco’s seventh novel and final novel published before his death in 2016. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

Numero zero book