Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Book Review “... corruption rife, mafiosi officially in parliament, tax dodgers in government, and the only ones to end up in prison are Albanian chicken thieves.  Decent people will carry on voting for the hoodlums because they won’t believe the BBC, or they don’t watch such programmes because they’re glued to something more trashy...” The bizarre has become the normal.  That’s what Umberto Eco’s latest novel, Numero Zero , from which the above quote is taken, seems to imply.  It is a slim novel (190 pages) with a scanty plot .  Commendatore Vimercate is an entrepreneur who “controls a dozen or so hotels on the Adriatic coast, owns a large number of homes for pensioners and the infirm, has various shady dealings around which there’s much speculation, and controls a number of local TV channels that start at eleven at night and broadcast nothing but auctions, telesales and a few risqué shows...”  He now wants to start a newspaper, or pretend to do so, because he wants to e

“The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth…” That’s one of the concluding lines in Umberto Eco’s fabulous novel, The Name of the Rose . I’m celebrating the 30 th anniversary of the publication of the English translation of the novel.  The original Italian version was published in 1980. The novel is set in a Christian monastery in Italy in the early 14 th century.  The plot unfolds in seven days in the year 1327 though the background will span many years earlier. Those were the years in which many people were burnt as heretics and witches by the Catholic Church, the most powerful religion of those days. Eco’s novel illustrates in its own subtle way how a very innocent woman was burnt as a witch simply because she had to sell her body to two monks in the monastery in return for the food she could take home for people at home.  The monks in question are tortured as heretics, and they are not innocent anyway.  The inqu