Zero number (novel)

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Zero Number is the seventh and final novel by the Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco . The Italian first edition took place under the title Numero Zero in January 2015, the German translation by Burkhart Kroeber appeared in the same year. The book is a media and political satire on tabloid journalism and set in Italy in 1992 .

content

The story is told by Colonna, an aging, unsuccessful philologist who was hired as a journalist. His editor-in-chief Simei hired him to write articles for the newspaper Domani (German: tomorrow ), a paper that will never be published. The company is funded by Commendatore Vimercate, who also owns a television station, a dozen magazines, a hotel chain and a number of nursing homes. The stated aim of the newspaper is to reveal the truth about everything, to print all the news "and a little more at that."

But the commendatore's real interest lies elsewhere: he wants to give his "zero numbers" to the powerful figures of the financial world and politics who do not want the truth to be revealed. They are then to pressure Vimercate to have him shut down the newspaper in exchange for access to the inner sanctuary of power.

Colonna meets the other members of the editorial team: Braggadocio (German: Prahlhans ) worked for a scandalous paper called What They Will Never Tell Us , Cambria spent his nights as a gossip reporter sneaking around police stations, Lucidi probably works for the secret service, Palatino has his Made a career in designing puzzles and crosswords, Costanza was a proofreader for various newspapers until they got so big that nobody cared about how many mistakes they printed, and most recently Maia Fresia, who was employed at a women's magazine in the glamor and love genre .

Colonna befriends Braggadocio, a paranoid who suspects conspiracies everywhere. He lets Colonna in on his research into the history of Mussolini , which will guarantee the Domani an edition in the hundreds of thousands: He pursues the theory that Mussolini was not killed in the last days of World War II and that the corpse shown in Milan was a Doppelganger, the real Mussolini was smuggled out of the country by church officials and had spent his final years in Argentina , or perhaps hiding in the Vatican while waiting for a fascist coup that would bring him back to power.

Eco's story weaves a series of events from the last days of World War II to the terrorist attacks of the 1970s. Many personalities from the last seventy years of Italian history play a role here: fascists and partisans , presidents such as Aldo Moro , Francesco Cossiga , Giulio Andreotti , popes such as John Paul I and John Paul II , bankers such as Michele Sindona , Roberto Calvi , cardinal Marcinkus and secret services and organizations such as the Special Operations Executive , CIA , the stay-behind organization Gladio and the left-wing extremist terrorist organization Red Brigades .

reception

The reviewers do not agree on where to place zero in Umberto Eco's work.

All reviewers immediately recognized the connection to the real person Silvio Berlusconi , whose nickname is Cavaliere , in the character of Commendatore Vimercate. But in the further reception the opinions diverge:

“The characters are too stereotypical, the plot is too under-complex”, says the reviewer of the world , while the reviewer of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung sees zero number as “one of Eco's best novels”. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the novel is referred to as a "feuilleton novel" and Eco's colportage talent is praised.

The reviewers of Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandradio Kultur, on the other hand, agree that the novel could not convince them: The text was “hair-raising fantasies and testifies to a blatant lack of knowledge about the media”, according to Deutschlandfunk, “rather disappointing”, says Deutschlandradio Kultur.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c zero number for pearl divers
  2. ↑ Review in the FAZ with 18 pages of the novel in the reading room
  3. ↑ Review in Deutschlandfunk
  4. ↑ Review in Deutschlandradio Kultur