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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

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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

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.

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.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is one of Eco's richest novels in a while...perhaps the richest since The Name of the Rose. Each of his novels, all of them, have provided the patient reader with rewards aplenty. The Mysterioius Flame, you will find, is worth the effort it takes to read it.

Yambo, a 60ish antiquarian book seller has a stroke that virtually wipes his mind clean...clean as if someone had erased a chalk board. The only memory he has is of the words he has read...all of them. His personal life, the fine points of reference we all need to know who we are...to define ourselves is gone. No recollection of family, friends, history....gone.

Yambo retreats to the family estate, Solara, where he has kept virtually every scrap of paper, every photograph...all the things we all keep to keep track of ourselves. He hopes that by surrounding himself with this material he will be able to regain his memory.

Eco is a superbly rick novelist. His stories are made up of various layers, each supporting and enhancing the other. The characters are memorable, the story well weaved. Even his setting, Solara is a treat. I can't help but believe that part of the difficulty in reading his work is due to the translating. Certainly Eco is several levels above most of his contemporaries. Does America have anyone like him.

You'll love the Mysterious Flame.

Umberto Eco's writing is great but not easy. This will stimulate your imagination and thinking, but an easy romp it is not. If you want to stimulate your imagination and thinking this is for you. If you just want a mystery this may be too much for you. This is probably not the best book to introduce you to Umberto Eco's writing, but If you already like his other books you will like this.

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.

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 position of knowing about Fascism before he knew about himself, and therefore having a kind of time traveler's understanding of the forces that shaped him. In this way, he might know important things about himself better than he would if he actually remembered them.

Similarly, he would have an adult's perspective of the adventure stories in which Yambo the boy immersed himself -- a fond, maybe even nostalgic, but ultimately detached voice that accompanies the reader when the young Yambo becomes involved in the true adventure of rescuing a group of men from the Black Shirts, which, while heroic, is horrific and tragic -- and stands in stark contrast to the tone of the adventure books themselves.

Eco's narrator is telling us a story he can't remember -- and somehow in attempting to tell it anyway, it becomes richer -- the ultimate detective story. Not that I as a reader have succeeded entirely in solving it -- for instance, I'm not at all sure what to make of Lila, Yambo's "Beatrice" -- but being a woman and a nonbeliever, I have always been mystified by female figures symbolizing yearning, loss, love, holiness, and the unattainable -- it's completely over my head, I'm afraid, so I leave that to other readers to make sense of.

But I liked this book, very much. It tells a good story from the point of view of a provokingly unusual narrative voice. It's my feeling that the press has given it short shrift -- and could stand to take another look.

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.

I have often joked that I would rather read Umberto Eco's shopping list than many of the so-called popular novels. In this book, Eco goes to prove me wrong. Eco has written a book that is a struggle to read, not because it is deep, complex, and rich but because it is an utter bore.

The story tells of the case of Yambo, a rare-book dealer living in Milan. Yambo suffers a curious brain injury straight out of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In his case, he can not recall anything that ever happened to him but he can remember every book he ever read. Curious. But Eco fails to do anything of much interest with this defect. For example, Yambo runs a book studio and has a female assistant. Yambo worries that perhaps he had an affair with her and wonders how she would react. He need not have worried, because like everyone else, she treats him with no mention of the past. Yambo's wife is perfectly accepting of his condition and Yambo is able to bluff his way through conversations with any friends or acquaintances he meets. The end result is that nothing much happens and the book drones on.

Yambo decides to ride off into the country to visit his childhood home in hopes that something there may trigger his memories. Yambo wonders around and gives us a detailed description of his bowel movements. "A lovely snail-shell structure still steaming." I was underwhelmed. Yambo wanders through the house finding secret rooms and reading old books. But none of this seems to go anywhere. In fact, it seems more like an excuse for Eco to discuss (although not in any detail), pre- and post-World War II Italian novels that Eco fondly remembers.

The book does pick up a little towards the final part but by then I just wished the book would end. I cared nothing for the main character of the story and found the whole enterprise an absolute chore to pull myself through. Eco has done much better. If you are a true fan then go ahead and read the book to see that Eco is, indeed, fallible. Otherwise choose one of his other books instead.

I think this is my favorite book by Eco, although all of his books are so rewarding, each in it's own way. This book might not be appealing to everyone, but if you've grown up loving books (including comics), this might be one of the most moving, exciting, and beautiful things you'll ever read. The more stuff you've read the more you'll enjoy this book, since it is packed full of references and allusions to other great works of literature.

The story is about an amnesiac, trying to reconstruct his past by perusing books, music, letters, etc. from his past. The character comes to life vividly as the story develops. There is a little of the excitement and mystery found in Eco's other books, and a lot of good story telling. I highly recommend it, and hope there is more on the way.