The Nature of Things

Numero Zero by Umberto Eco My rating: 3 of 5 stars Humberto Eco's latest is more novella than novel at only 208 pages. I read it in translation, of course, and found it to be a quick and easy read, quite a change from some of the other Eco books I've read, such as The Name of the Rose , Foucault's Pendulum , and The Prague Cemetery . Even though it is slimmer and perhaps more accessible than those other books, Numero Zero is full of Eco's trademark love of conspiracies and of afflicting the powerful. It is a satire on the politics of modern Italy and it seems to me that the author is having great fun in its telling. I sort of imagine him chuckling away to himself as he sits at his word processor, getting it all on the record and tweaking the language to make it just a bit more acerbic. The time is 1992. It's the Berlusconi era in Italy. A recent scandal revealed a labyrinthine system of kickbacks and payoffs that went straight to the center of power in the Italia...