If they hadn’t been so apathetic, Berlusconi would not have stayed in power for so long. But the main object of Eco’s derision is the Italian people. In the essay, which was published in The Daily Telegraph, Eco scorns former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a leader known best for bribing Italian senators, hosting “bunga bunga” sex parties, and serenading George Bush, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin with love songs he wrote. In ‘robust’ democracies there should be no need to defend press freedom, because nobody would ever think to challenge it.” “If such a step is necessary, it means that society, and therefore much of the press, is diseased. “I feel some hesitation and about intervening in defense of press freedom,” Umberto Eco wrote in 2009. Nonetheless, where the book is at its considerable best is its angry and persuasive depiction of the essential rottenness of post-war Italian politics.In Umberto Eco's latest novel, conspiracy theories, the press, and lazy readers meet. Not all the tangents he goes off on-sports-car specifications, fraudulent orders of chivalry-are as rewarding as he seems to think. What follows, again not for the first time, is a combination of a conventional thriller and a whole lot of other stuff that Eco wants us to know about. (In Eco’s hands, this becomes surprisingly convincing.) Instead, that famously disfigured corpse belonged to somebody else, while Il Duce himself was smuggled to Argentina. The latest book, like many of its predecessors, is based around a conspiracy theory-in this case, rather a good one. There’s still plenty to enjoy and at an unusually slim 200 pages, Numero Zero is also a pretty effortless way for new Eco readers to see what all the fuss is about. Ever since The Name of the Rose conquered the world in the 1980s, every new Umberto Eco novel has been a fully-fledged literary event-without any quite matching the sustained brilliance of that debut.
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