I got If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino as an Xmas present when I was seventeen, and I loved it to bits. Absolutely amazing book. But why am I talking about Calvino? Because I think I’m suffering from some obscure disease probably called something like calvinoecotrepidatioensis, wherein every time my eyes read the characters forming the name “Umberto Eco”, what reaches my brain is “Italo Calvino”.
It even happened when I picked this book up and sat down to read it. I though “ooh, can’t remember this Calvino book” and then I flipped to the copyright page and back and forth and finally “darn!! It’s Umberto Eco!!!! Again!”
I assume that the same thing happened when I picked this book up on a sale in 2019. I don’t know where the confusion originates — I’ve barely read any Eco (I think perhaps just one book — The Island From The Day before, which I quite enjoyed), while I’ve read a lot of Calvino’s books.
Uhm, uhm, uhm… I don’t really know what to say about this book. It’s obviously an Old Man Yells At Clouds type of book (it’s his last one), where he just bitches about all the things that annoy him. The main target here are those nefarious, untrustworthy, horrible nihilists in the press. Journalists! He hates them soooo muuuuuch. But there’s also just random things, like how things like mobile phones suck (which is a strange thing to include in a book set in 1992).
The other parts of the book are the kinds of things I’ve always imagined that Eco specialises in — there’s a lot of conspiracies and stuff. But also other typical Old Male Author Staples, like having the protagonist be an old male author who is inexplicably attractive to a much younger woman. And pages and pages and pages of stuff about WWII. This stuff is told with a very Italian slant, so he natters on about Mussolini minutiae that’s perhaps known to Italians, but he might as well be reciting car stats. Which he also does! There’s a half a dozen page monologue where he explains that all available options for buying a new car sucks, because of various car stats.
So this all sounds like the worst book ever, right? No, I kinda liked it. It’s oddly well written, and parts of it are downright exciting. And there’s a lot of witty dialogue, like the bit where they mouth off jokes to one another for four pages like “Why is it that God must be a completely perfect creation? Because if he were completely hopeless, he’d be my cousin Gustavo.”
Numero Zero (2015) by Umberto Eco (buy new, buy used, 3.17 on Goodreads)