The late, great Umberto Eco understood the difference. From Numero Zero, his final novel.
Don’t be naive. We’re talking about finance, not business. First buy, then wait and see where the money to pay for it comes from.
Numero Zero is a short, but excellent novel, a clever, more accessible Foucault’s Pendulum combined with a dash of nostalgia for the forgotten backways of Milano and Eco’s academic ideas about the nebulous nature of history and text.
I was hesitant to read this one after the relative disappointments of The Prague Cemetery and The Mysterious Flame of the Queen of Loanna. And I took my time with it, reading it first in Italian, then in English. It was both a pleasure and relief to discover that Dr. Eco closed out his literary career on a high note.