Umberto Eco wrote Numero Zero as a pamphlet novel about deception and framed fraud: after all, as one of the characters says, there is always someone who “deceives us behind our back”, even if it seems to be telling the truth, behind any deception there is another deception, the next one in it, and so on to infinity.
“Newspapers are lying, historians are lying, television is also lying today”: is it even possible to trust at least something or someone? For even the most courageous and exposing article of the publication serves the purely private interests of the shareholder: the one who pays is the one who orders the music. And how can we avoid the temptation and not become a mad sociopath and a myth-lover obsessed with a global conspiracy? Eco again aggressively focuses attention on the motifs already touched on in the Foucault Pendulum and in the Prague Cemetery. Braggadoccio is a dreamer and a madman, but he bases his version of Mussolini’s salvation on well-known and dedicated facts, there are no special secrets where but there is only a biased flow of information and deliberately false interpretations.
The narrative has a three-layer structure. Firstly, these are the internal monologues of the Colonna, as well as the vicissitudes of his love story, conversations with Maya; secondly, the investigation of Braggadocho, which is risky in every sense, with micro-plots appearing as it develops; and thirdly, and this is the main thing here - weekly editorial cadre, full of rich dialogues, arguments and counterarguments, analysis of “homework assignments”, games, anecdotes. In the course of these parodies (after all it is a fake newspaper) Eco is pulling out the hidden mechanisms of “bad journalism” - a machine for producing lies, slander and undermining reputation.
Eco with pleasure and inimitable sarcasm examines the structure of the information society, which is in the stage of disintegration. He gets to all, even the most innocent and obvious mechanisms of information, like horoscopes, obituaries and weather forecasts.
However, in Eco's novel, as often happens with him, telling one thing turns out to be a completely different thing. For the grotesque satirical envelope, for intrigues and machinations, for lapidary, but quite self-sufficient love story, for large and small digressions (including poetic sketches of the former Milan), for longs (such as excerpts from the report on the autopsy of Mussolini) and sudden by the accelerations of action, behind jokes on the verge of a foul, arising out of place, - behind all this, something else lurks. And this "something else" is the degradation of his beautiful Italy, general apathy, nihilism and unshakable indifference (“nothing can disturb us in this country”), people are comfortable in the nest of soothing self-deception and sober illusions. And the press, deftly guided by politicians and businessmen, daily makes titanic efforts to wake people up just to put them to sleep even more.
