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.
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