A group of journalistic hacks gather together to produce a dummy newspaper whose secret purpose is to gain for their millionaire sponsor access to the inner circles of high society (basically through the power of press blackmail). One of them spins conspiracy theories linking the CIA and right wing groups to the 'murder' of pope John Paul I and the 'mystery' of Mussolini's death. The paranoid narrator fears for his life.
The themes are, I suppose, truth and fake truth, and how a newspaper can dictate the agenda and create beliefs with hints and innuendos. There is the skeleton of a thriller plot. Much of the action seemed irrelevant. There were pages of what seemed like filling (and the novel is only 190 pages), such as the couple of pages in which the journalists made silly jokes, or the two pages of autopsy report. Most of the conspiracy theories were re-peddled from other sources.
Selected quotes:
- "Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else ... the more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong." (Ch 1)
- "It's not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news." (Ch 5)
- "What, after all, is the pink body of an angel if not a deceptive integument that cloaks a skeleton, even if it's a celestial one?" (Ch 18)
February 2022; 190 pages
Eco wrote the stunning The Miracle of the Rose. He has also written Foucault's Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery.
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