Umberto Eco died in 2016, and this book was published in Italy under the title Papé Satàn Aleppe in the same year. The original title (the English one is the subtitle in the Italian) refers to a very ambiguous line in Dante that no-one really understands. Eco’s last novel, Numero Zero, seemed to me to be a return to the form of The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, after a number of works which might charitably be described as frolics of his own. His novelistic career had always run in tandem with his academic, non-fiction and journalistic work. But the reader can only leave this volume with a sense of disappointment and frustration.
