Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #230604 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Amazon.com
The premise of Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, may strike some readers as laughably unpromising, and others as breathtakingly rich. A sixty-ish Milanese antiquarian bookseller nicknamed Yambo suffers a stroke and loses his memory of everything but the words he has read: poems, scenes from novels, miscellaneous quotations. His wife Paola fills in the bare essentials of his family history, but in order to trigger original memories, Yambo retreats alone to his ancestral home at Solara, a large country house with an improbably intact collection of family papers, books, gramophone records, and photographs. The house is a museum of Yambo's childhood, conventiently empty of people, except of course for one old family servant with a long memory--an apt metaphor for the mind. Yambo submerges himself in these artifacts, rereading almost everything he read as a school boy, blazing a meandering, sometimes misguided, often enchanting trail of words. Flares of recognition do come, like "mysterious flames," but these only signal that Yambo remembers something; they do not return that memory to him. It is like being handed a wrapped package, the contents of which he can only guess.

Within the limitations of Yambo's handicap and quest, Eco creates wondrous variety, wringing surprise and delight from such shamelessly hackneyed plot twists as the discovery of a hidden room. Illustrated with the cartoons, sheet music covers, and book jackets that Yambo uncovers in his search, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana can be read as a love letter to literature, a layered excavation of an Italian boyhood of the 1940s, and a sly meditation on human consciousness. Both playful and reverent, it stands with The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before as among Eco's most successful novels. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
When aging Italian book-dealer Yambo, hero of this engaging if somewhat bloodless novel of ideas, regains consciousness after a mysterious coma, he suffers a peculiar form of amnesia. His "public" memory of languages, everyday routines, history and literature remains intact, but his autobiographical memory of personal experiences—of his family, lovers, childhood, even his name—is gone. He can spout literary and cultural allusions on any topic, citing everything from Moby-Dick to Star Trek, but complains, "I don't have feelings, I only have memorable sayings." To recover his past, he repairs to his boyhood home to peruse a cache of memorabilia amassed in his youth during Mussolini's reign and WWII, consisting of comic books, schoolbooks, Fascist propaganda, popular music, romantic novels and his own poetry about an unattainable high school beauty. The setup allows semiotician and novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose, etc.) to indulge his passion for pulp materials by reproducing such objects as movie posters, song lyrics and a graphic novella rendering the Book of Revelation as a Flash Gordon melodrama, with intriguing asides on cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind thrown in. The result has a somewhat academic feel, but it's an absorbing exploration of how that most fundamental master-narrative, our memory, is pieced together from a bricolage of pop culture. Illus. Author tour. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Italian novelist, scholar and all-around polymath Umberto Eco never met a byte of cultural data he didn't like, and his new novel -- or whatever this is -- is no exception. Part comic book, part scholarly dissertation and part faux-memoir, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a work of spectacular appetites and epic confusion.

Books about books are enjoying a surge of popularity these days, but Eco has been working the vein for more than 20 years, since The Name of the Rose -- a medieval detective novel of such monumental braininess it makes The Da Vinci Code resemble Spot the Dog -- became a global blockbuster 20 years ago. Like The Name of the Rose, which far more people bought than managed to finish, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana sounds more straightforward than it actually is: Sixty-year-old Yambo Bodoni, a rare-book dealer in Milan, suffers a stroke that erases all memory of his life, while leaving untouched a vast repository of literary lines and references, virtually all that he has ever read, heard or seen in print.

It's a tantalizing premise -- a human being reduced to a walking encyclopedia of cultural detritus, an uber-scholar who literally knows the world only through text. The novel's early going is engagingly brisk, as the amnesiac Bodoni tries to step back into his marriage and career while simultaneously puzzling out the literary scraps in his head. Bodoni's feelings of detachment give the first chapters a buoyant comic flavor, underscored by an awareness of profound loss. Learning from a friend that he was an inveterate adulterer, for instance, he wonders if he was having an affair with his beautiful assistant at the time of his stroke, but modesty prevents him from inquiring directly and prompts the mournful observation that "the best part of having loved . . . is the memory of having loved." Even sex is new to him: When he and his wife, Paola, finally make love, he observes: "That's not bad. Now I know why people are so fond of it."

Bodoni's condition leads him to a country estate in Solara owned by his grandfather, who was also a book collector. There, in isolation, he pores over a vast library of his childhood materials, everything from diaries and sentimental novels to comic books and old 78 records, with the hope of reassembling an identity and uncovering the source of his literary obsessions -- in particular, his extensive mental collection of images of fog and the "mysterious flame" of the book's title. Unfortunately, this is exactly where Eco slides almost completely into theory; once Bodoni steps into his childhood attic, the novel hyperventilates, subsumed by detailed summary of everything he finds. The splashy period illustrations notwithstanding, only the most intrepid reader will hack through this undifferentiated jungle of comic book plots, song lyrics, novel encapsulations and summarized cartoons that occupy fully 200 pages of the book.

Eco's point is that Bodoni, undistracted by living memory, has become a truly postmodern figure, a pure conduit of culture. This is an interesting idea, and no doubt this section of the novel will be lovingly scrutinized by any number of graduate students of literary theory for years to come. But in terms of novelistic engagement -- well, the wind goes completely out of the sails. Twenty pages would have made the point.

Eco seems to know this, and the book is rescued, if belatedly, by a second stroke, which restores Bodoni's memory but also leaves him completely incapacitated. A novel from the point of view of someone in a coma isn't a trick most writers should try, but Eco pulls it off. After a few pages of throat clearing, the story is up and running again. Beyond lies the most accessible and engaging portion of the novel, as Bodoni's literary obsessions crystallize around a personal history that he recounts with brio, a story of youthful love and desperate bravery in war. In a nod to Dante -- and what Italian novelist doesn't nod to Dante? -- the "mysterious flame" of the novel belongs to Lila Saba, the girl Bodoni loved but never, except for one fleeting encounter, spoke to. Featuring the political contortions of Il Duce's Italy, a sexually repressive Catholic education and a memorable escapade involving the rescue of a group of Russian deserters, this section of the novel accomplishes, with straightforward narrative clarity, what the middle passages cannot: a feeling for the way that various sources, literary and personal, build a web of meaning in the mind over a lifetime.

It's faint praise, perhaps, to say that a novel is worth the trouble, but that's the sort of book Eco has written here. Too long by half, it nevertheless rewards the patient reader with a tale that's both intellectually provoking and, in the end, emotionally serious. I have to say, along about page 250, in the midst of a long disquisition on Flash Gordon, he had me worried. But it's a rare and brave writer who will hazard losing a reader's attention like this. I'm glad I stuck it out.

Reviewed by Justin Cronin
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

First 1/3 is thought provoking...
but the second third is tediously repetitive unless you're fascinated by fifty year old Italian comics, and the last third is little more than 150 pages of cud chewing. Kind of like that guy I met in a pub the other day whose self-absorbed prattle was entertaining for the first five minutes. If you want to read a really semiotic novel check out Darkmans by the very wonderful Nicola Barker.

best fiction I've ever read
This is definitely the culmination of Eco's fantastic fiction career, and he's writtten some doozies. He continues to go beyond impressing to capping his reputation as one of today's best writers, if not the best. I was really amazed at this book, part Modernist (T.S.Eliot would have been proud), and part post-Modernist, he weaves a tale here that makes us all look in the mirror and think really hard about who we are & how we come to that conclusion. Thank you, Mr Eco; I think this is his best yet. Would have rated it twenty if I could have.

"Rosebud" Italian Style
Once again, semiotician-novelist Umberto Eco surprises us, delights us, but mostly plays with us in "Queen Loana." It's premise is simplicity itself: Antiquarian book dealer Giambattista (Yambo) Bodoni has suffered a stroke at age 59.5 in 1991. As a result, as his doctor explains, he's lost his episodic memory--the episodes of his own life--even though he can speak and read, and he knows the identities of Napoleon, McArthur, Mussolini, etc. etc. But he doesn't recognize his own wife, and when he returns to work he has no idea if he's ever had an affair with his young assistant (she never explains).

At the urging of his doctor and his family he leaves his Milanese home to return to his family's country home, where he unearths a treasure trove of Italian popular culture from the Fascist era. This allows Prof. Eco to journey through comic books (including Italian versions of Mickey Mouse), popular fiction, magazine illustrations, newspaper articles, photomontages of Il Duce, and the like--many of which are reproduced in this handsomely designed volume.

It's part history, part fiction, part lecture on that wartime popular culture, and part a search for a lost love (alright--infatuation); and there's also a chilling wartime thriller lurking within. It ends (in a Deco daze of glorious color) with the Book of Revelation as told through the pages of Flash Gordon. And when it did, I could almost imagine the author, peering over my shoulder, seeing me smile, chuckling, "ah, you liked that, did you?"

Yes.

Notes and asides: Geoffrey Brock's translation is whatever's better than first-rate. Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) designed a typeface (a truetype version is likely loaded on your own computer). As is noted on the copyright page, however, Prof. Eco's book is set in Sabon and Interstate. Another of the author's winks and nudges?