The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana [Paperback]

Umberto Eco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2006

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood. His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school and morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image - the schoolgirl he never forgot. Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves and other printed ephemera, "The Mysterious Flame" is a fascinating and hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books; paperback / softback edition (June 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099481375
• ISBN-13: 978-0099481379
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (89 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

103 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death, June 20, 2005

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Hardcover)

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

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eco at His Best & Worst, July 5, 2005

By 

Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Hardcover)

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.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Umberto Eco Revisits Hidden Meanings Of Literature And Life, May 14, 2005

By 

Norman F. Birnberg (Long Beach, Ca USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Hardcover)

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.