Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary nègre, he dreams of writing his own book, but can’t break the habit of alluding to others’ work: he even refers to himself as a ‘man without qualities’. One day in 1992, he is commissioned to ghostwrite a memoir about a newspaper being launched in Milan. Domani (‘Tomorrow’) will never be published: a tycoon who finances it plans to use it as a blackmail tool in his shady dealings. The proposed title of the memoir, Domani: Yesterday, sets the tone for this pacy book that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
One of the reporters on Domani, named Braggadocio, tells Colonna he’s got a scoop: apparently, it wasn’t Mussolini but his body-double who was executed in 1945. The Duce himself spent the next several decades hiding in Argentina, or possibly the Vatican, while a conspiracy of ‘stay-behinds’ plotted to bring him back as a Fascist mascot. Braggadocio, with his ghoulish interest in corpses, doesn’t sound very convincing, and it’s not until the hapless hack is found dead that Colonna begins to think that he might have been on to something.
Whatever one makes of the various versions of Mussolini’s death (or survival) at the hands of Italian partisans, followed by the public humiliation of his (or his double’s) body, his shadow does seem to hang over postwar Italy, particularly the anni di piombi, ‘years of lead’ (1968–82), marked by terrorism and political instability. By having an unreliable narrator recount those events, Eco puts his reader on guard, exposing history as a soft science.
‘News doesn’t need to be invented,’ Colonna quips to his colleagues. ‘All you have to do is recycle it.’
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