The newspaper is to be published in a series of 12 issues numbered 01 to 012. The narrator, a sometime translator from German and a ghost-writer of detective stories, is appointed as the chronicler of the newspaper’s creation and foreseen demise. “You just have to know how to read the coffee grounds.” “Everything always fits with everything else,” says one of the characters. In order to blackmail a businessman, a con artist decides to create a newspaper financed by that businessman, which, under the appearance of investigative journalism, will invent stories that allude to shady events the businessman won’t want to be made public. Unfortunately, what could have been an entertaining satire of the historian-journalist’s construction of reality becomes a cluttered catalogue of improbable hypotheses and more or less amusing what-ifs, mixed up with the story of a vaguely romantic entanglement between two fumbling reporters. To illustrate his point, Eco builds his plot around the creation of a paper in which news is made up from factual titbits, then fed to an audience of common readers willing to believe all sorts of outlandish scenarios and wild conspiracy theories. “Historical truth, for Menard, is not what has happened it is what we deem to have happened.” What we deem to have happened, Eco answers, in the same ironic tone, is what the newspapers tell us has happened.

“History, mother of truth: the idea is astounding,” writes Borges, tongue-in-cheek. Eco has found inspiration, once again, in Borges’s literary inventions, but this time the result is disappointing.Įco’s unacknowledged starting point is the underlying idea in the short story “ Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”, Borges’s celebrated spoof of poetic truth. Literary ghosts have a habit of coming back to haunt the writers who have conjured them on to the page, and the spirit of Borges hovers over Eco’s latest novel – the spirit, but not the letter. I n The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco – in what some might consider an act of lèse majesté towards his literary hero, Jorge Luis Borges – gave his murderous blind librarian the name of Jorge de Burgos.

Numero zero by umberto eco