“This witty and wry novel…also contains a few flimsy elements and peculiar digressions. Still, it’s hard not to be charmed by the zest of the author. I imagine the gray-bearded 83-year-old professor chortling away as he typed in some book-lined sanctuary.”
“The main plot of Numero Zero is a kind of potboiler that never really boils. Once the bones of the main story have been laid out, Eco turns Numero Zero into a kind of see-saw game.”
And yet for all that, Numero Zero feels oddly empty as a novel, undeveloped, not quite fully thought out. On the one hand, it's a short book, barely 160 pages, and it has something of a sketched-out quality, like a treatment more than a fully rendered narrative.
