![]() ![]() ![]() It is the April of 1992, and the fifty-year old Colonna arrives in Milan to meet a certain Simei who wants him to ghost-write a book titled Tomorrow: Yesterday to be released under Simei’s name. It is the experience in the last activity which helps Colonna (we never learn the protagonist’s first name) to land a well-paid but rather strange job which will turn his life upside down. His subsequent jobs included tutoring, writing for newspapers, editing, reading manuscripts, and ghostwriting. He is an extremely well-read loser who failed to get a university degree neglecting the lectures to work on translations from German, a very lucrative language at the time. This bitter statement by the main character of Umberto Eco’s new novel refers primarily to himself. If you want to win, you have to know one single thing and not to waste your time on knowing everything: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. Losers, such as autodidacts, always possess knowledge vaster than that of winners. ![]()
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