Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #498783 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780151011407
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
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
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

"Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death
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 introduces a dramatic twist in the plot (which will not be divulged) that changes the nature of Yambo's quest.

The second half of the book is devoted to Yambo's examination of his life as he now remembers it and the meaning of his quest for his identity. Answer to questions raised in the first half of the book, such as Yambo's strange attraction for foggy days, are explained. The tone of the narrative in this half of the book is quite different from the narrative in the first. As more information is revealed to Yambo, and to the reader, the focus turns not just to Yambo's quest for memory but the importance of memory in one's life. At the same time, what we choose to forget is sometimes just as important to the structure of our lives as that which we choose to remember.

The intricate thought processes of Yambo as he seeks to recreate his life are set out beautifully by Eco. It is hard to describe the impact of Eco's writing except to refer back to the sentences that Samuel Butler wrote after those lines that started this review:

"Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering." Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another, for Yambo and, through Yambo's thoughts, to the reader.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is well worth reading.
L. Fleisig

Eco at His Best & Worst
Umberto Eco is one of the few writers whose incredible intelligence blazes on every page of his books. Fortunately, despite the fact that his intelligence cannot be ignored, he generally doesn't make his reader feel small and stupid. In fact, when Eco is at his best, the fascinations of the story draw you in and make you forget the challenges of what you are reading. When he is at his worst, the going gets tougher, like listening to a professor who is interesting but not really entertaining. In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana we get Eco at his best and worst.

This novel is divided into three parts and the first part is as good as anything Eco's written since The Name of the Rose. We are given the interesting premise of a man, Yambo, who has lost the memory of the events of his life while retaining the memory of the things he has learned--the books he has read, the music he has heard, etc. Eco is able to believably evoke the experience of this man whose mind is like a textbook, full of facts but with no connection to the people who sees before him. It is a fascinating point of view. As the story progresses, he and his family and friends attempt to figure out ways to bring back his personal memories. To that end, he is packed off alone to his childhood home in Solara.

It is in part two, the stay in Solara, where the going gets tougher. This section is basically a review of the music and literature of pre- and post-WWII Italy. Not being Italian, I had very little connection to the bulk of the material described though it did evoke some memories of my own childhood literary experiences. It is amazing how much literature really does become universal in Western culture. Still, this section basically came across as Eco's own stroll down memory lane and I think, even for an Italian of similar vintage, it goes on rather long.

In section three, Eco gets back on track with his story. Yambo has had another "episode" but this time his personal memories are returning. We hear Yambo's unconscious mind answer some of the questions about his life that have been raised, the bulk of which centers around a great story of the young Yambo helping some Partisans escape capture during the war. I was less than thrilled by Eco's version of the "going into the light" death at the end of the book but he gained back a lot of my goodwill in this closing section.

In the final analysis, this is a pretty good novel. Eco's work will forever suffer in comparison to his truly great first novel, The Name of the Rose. I have read all of his novels since then and this is without a doubt the best complete novel he's written since Foucault's Pendulum. Some of the writing in section one may be the best he's ever done. It is definitely worth reading.

Umberto Eco Revisits Hidden Meanings Of Literature And Life
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.