Numero Zero is moreover a satirical formalisation of a simple concept: if you want to write a novel plenty of facts, events, implications and characters, you can do that and be stylistically accurate and formally more coherent than Dan Brown. If many readers found the slim and bitterish Numero Zero somewhat disappointing compared to the great, copious and detailed narratives he had accustomed us to, it seems to me that this is rather an exercise of style closer to his semiotic and textual analysis than to the novel as an overflowing storytelling. If anything there is to complain upon, it is that the novel goes so much straight to the point that a reader used to Eco’s flowing works would rather be surprised at the slim plot and the jibe of its prose. However, the reader is led with a coherent thread: linguistic, stylistic, formal, historical, cultural irony which Eco employs as an instrument to talk about today’s Italy. Many Italian readers found the story well structured and articulated from beginning to end, but did not feel actually intrigued by the plot, seen as a simplified attempt at depicting a society that adds little more to what we already know. Flawless is, on the contrary, the narrative structure with its witty and smooth language which conveys the idea of a society where fair play and search for clarity are mere illusions (is there a country where they are not?).

Its dry and elegant narrative structure could be taken as a manual of style to understand how serious irony can be when it comes to account for Italian flawed society. Numero Zero is the latest novel by Umberto Eco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, USA and Harvill Secker, GB, English translation by Richard Dixon*): a wise and sharp operetta about Italy, narrated in a short, flowing way and with an impeccable, cultured and witty style without pedantry. It is a figure of thought that can function as a stylistic basis of a novel, a poem, a play.

Irony is the most refined and profound rhetorical figure in the cultural history of the world.

Umberto eco zero