The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I've just finished listening to an unabridged audio recording of "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," and thought it was pretty wonderful. I have "read" read other Eco novels in the past -- "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" -- and liked them both very much. When I finished listening to "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," I went online to see what others had made of the novel, and read a number of reviews -- from the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times and others, as well as many of the reviews published here. Almost all were lukewarm. Maybe it's because I listened to this novel rather than read it that I feel as though I've experienced this novel so differently from other reviewers as to wonder whether we're writing about the same book. We've all gleaned similar basics -- that this is the story of an antiquarian bookseller named "Yambo" Bodoni, who, after having a stroke, has lost his personal memory -- but not his memory of books and other cultural artifacts. In Part 1, he wanders around Milan trying to recover his memory. In Part 2, he sifts through his childhood books and papers in the family's country house. In Part 3, having had another stroke, he now remembers almost everything, but is in a coma and cannot communicate with anyone except himself (and, through the mysterious proxy of fiction, the reader). This much doesn't seem in question. But to me, something fascinating and original (yes, I know, nothing is original) happens in that long, second section of the book -- the one that many reviewers liked least -- that seems valuable and important. Here, Yambo is trying to reconstruct his childhood from adventure books, comics, school papers, phonograph records and Fascist propaganda, and although he doesn't succeed in actually remembering his childhood, something much more interesting happens. It's not so much that he reconstructs his own childhood -- through these "paper memories" -- from the perspective of a "stranger," as he puts it, but rather, that he does it from the perspective of an adult. That may seem obvious, but in fact, it's something no one (except the odd amnesiac) can ever do. Our memory of childhood events is necessarily subjective and emotional -- and any true recollection is necessarily limited by the narrow frame of reference we possess as children. So it seems to me Eco is trying something very unusual by having his narrator reconstruct his own childhood without the limitations imposed by a sense of self. This is an ambitious undertaking, and rather than resulting in a constrained self-portrait, in many ways, it is a much fuller one. For example, Yambo the adult discovers that Yambo the child was a Barilla Boy, a kind of Fascist boy scout. A Yambo with an intact memory would probably have remembered this -- and remembered his eventual rejection of Fascism as he grew older. But a Yambo with no memory would come at this knowledge from the other direction -- from the pos

This is a fascinating journey - be warned it is a long journey - through 60 years of Italian history through the eyes (or memories) of book dealer named Yambo. The journey is the plot, I think other reviewers missed this. The whole book is a reminiscence like a grandfather telling his grandchildren of his youth, but with the twist that the grandfather is reconstructing his past after his memory is lost. The book is published with color illustrations, cartoons, book covers, cartoons, sheet music, poem, lyrics, etc. of the things Yambo finds in his childhood home and uses to rediscover his past. It's a great idea. A cultural history. It will be much more meaningful to Italians who remember these things. Still, reading the book I was able to get into the shoes of an Italian boy before, during and after WWII. I enjoyed it for that and kept reading. There's a philosophical subtext about how real something is if you don't remember it. Reality and memory are linked, or at least it feels that way. Not light reading, but a remarkable fictional cultural history of 20th century Italy through one man's memories.

When he isn't writing complex, genre-twisting novels, Umberto Eco is one of the leading scholars of semiotics, a discipline that explores the ways symbol systems (like language) work. All of his fiction, to greater or lesser degree, is an extension of his fascination with the symbol-system of language and its relationship to the people who use it. (The Name of the Rose is a good case in point.) The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is perhaps as close as Eco may ever come to writing an "autobiographical" novel. The main character, a middle-aged Italian who makes his living selling rare books, suffers a memory loss. This provides Eco with the chance to explore the relationship that every individual has to their memories, and to consider whether memory (and our thoughts in general) are truly "personal" or all culturally derived. So this work, with all its gaudy cartoon illustrations, is perhaps the most overtly about the very subject Eco is best versed in (semiotics) and the most clearly anchored in the reality of growing up in Fascist Italy (as Eco himself did). Sure, there's a lot of detail flying by, as there always is in Eco's work, but I found the book uniquely moving. The narrator in this book is not just a clever symbolic construction (like Baudolino) or a trope (the main character in The Name of the Rose is a medieval Sherlock Holmes), but a cartoon stand-in for the author. This might be Eco's greatest novelist achievement. A stunning surprise of a book, and a visual treat.

to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die." Samuel Butler I approached Umberto Eco's new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, with some trepidation. I have sometime found Eco's work to be a bit difficult to get through. It became very apparent that I would have no such problems with this book. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was not only a very accessible book but, more importantly, it was at once both immensely enjoyable and thought-provoking. Before turning to the book itself, I found it interesting that the book is filled with illustrations. Throughout the book World War Two propaganda posters, newspaper clippings, comic book pages, and ads from Italian fashion magazines are printed alongside the text. Some might assert that Eco's reliance on illustrations may detract from the text or represent something of a gimmick. I think the illustrations are visually stunning and serve to recreate the social and political atmosphere of Italy in the 1930s and 1940s during which time much of the book takes place. They add a visual punch to the thoughts of Eco's narrator. The book opens with Giambattista Boldoni, a 59-year old rare book dealer, awaking from a light coma in a hospital after suffering a stroke. It is determined quickly that Boldoni, known to his friends and family since childhood as Yambo, is suffering from partial amnesia. Although he has a vivid memory of social and cultural events through his life he has no memory of anything relating to his personal life. The first chapter is a classic of pop-culture allusions and metaphors. Yambo's sentences come out in stream of consciousness fashion with no personal context at all. Yambo's sentences consist of a series of bits of quotations from Poe, Conan-Doyle, Robert Lewis Stevenson, songs, ad slogans and other reference that I could spend weeks trying to identify. The rest of the book, like Eco's Name of the Rose of The Island of the Day before is something of a detective story. Yambo turns sleuth and sets out to discover who he is and how he came to be him. Yambo and his wife agree in short order that this mystery would best be solved if Yambo moves back to his family's country home were Yambo spent most of his childhood. He arrives to find that most of his possessions and those of his parents and grandparents are stored in the attic or in various locations throughout the house. He begins opening boxes to find old phonograph records, school notebooks, photographs, Italian and American comic books and newspaper clippings dating back to the 30s and 40s'. Some of these items ignite a little spark in his head (as Eco puts it) but nothing really serves to restore his memories. Those little sparks seem futile and frustrate Yambo, like a butane cigarette lighter on a windy day must frustrate a smoker just dying to light up a smoke. Nevertheless, Yambo makes some progress. About halfway through the book Eco

Memory is a subject recurring in literature. Umberto Eco's latest novel is an exhilirating romp through pop culture. Readers are left as dazzled as the narrator Yambo in dissecting everything from poetry to illustrated postcards, gramophone records to newspaper articles. Yambo never manages to recover his sense of identity after his journey through his childhood library at his country home in Solara. Is memory tied to a recall of the larger culture? Eco seems to say no to this question and at the end of the novel we are like Yambo in still being enshrouded in the fog of memory. In contrast to Marcel Proust's "Temps Perdu," in which the famous tea and madeleine cake recapture a lifetime for the narrator, in "The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana" Yambo's efforts to rediscover his persona is thwarted by all he reads, sees, hears and experiences. Eco's reading of the human experience is as elusive as his subject and the novel above all is an ode to a lifetime of scholarly study of the hidden meanings of literature and life.