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Books

Umberto Eco really tries our patience

It is hard to tell who knows what in Numero Zero, Eco’s deliberately confusing novel about blackmail, Musssolini’s double and an imaginary newspaper carrying yesterday’s news

7 November 2015

9:00 AM

7 November 2015

9:00 AM

Numero Zero Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

Harvill Secker, pp.208, £16.99, ISBN: 9781910701089

Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary nègre, he dreams of writing his own book, but can’t break the habit of alluding to others’ work: he even refers to himself as a ‘man without qualities’. One day in 1992, he is commissioned to ghostwrite a memoir about a newspaper being launched in Milan.

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