The ANNOTICO Report

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is about Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni,
a 60ish antiquarian book dealer, who loses his memory after an accident.
Yambo wakes the morning of April 15, 1991, to discover that he doesn't know
his name but can remember every word of every book he has read. So when
anyone asks him a question he replies with a quotation from a book.  Yambo
explains. "I can't seem to say anything that comes from the heart. I don't
have feelings, I only have memorable sayings."

Ever since his 1983 international best-seller "The Name of the Rose,"
Umberto Eco has turned out fictions that are at once historical novels,
detective stories and scholarly ramblings on, for example, an ancient order
with a scheme to dominate the world ("Foucault's Pendulum"), a 1643
shipwreck that relates to the problem of longitude ("The Island of the Day
Before") and a merry group of 13th century pranksters ("Baudolino"). These
novels tend to be hard to read not because of their arcane subject matter
but because Eco sacrifices plot and character to semiotic digressions.

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
By Umberto Eco; translated by Geoffrey Brock
Harcourt; 469 PAGES; $27

San Francisco Chronicle
Reviewed by Tamara Straus
Sunday, June 5, 2005

Umberto Eco has long flirted with the postmodernist idea that all texts are
just whirling fragments of other texts, caught up in an infinite blizzard
of signs and meanings. In "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," Eco's
fifth and most accessible novel, he applies that theory to memory to poke
fun at the fact that our understanding of the past is just as slippery and
scattered.

Eco is no stranger to the novel of ideas. Ever since his 1983 international
best-seller "The Name of the Rose," he has turned out fictions that are at
once historical novels, detective stories and scholarly ramblings on, for
example, an ancient order with a scheme to dominate the world ("Foucault's
Pendulum"), a 1643 shipwreck that relates to the problem of longitude ("The
Island of the Day Before") and a merry group of 13th century pranksters
("Baudolino"). These novels tend to be hard to read not because of their
arcane subject matter but because Eco sacrifices plot and character to
semiotic digressions. It is Eco's great misfortune as a novelist that he is
a polymath fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce and Borges
without their knack for narrative. One idea or symbol reminds him of a
string of others, causing a kind of encyclopedic domino effect that leaves
the narrator in a state of ecstasy but the reader numb from detail.

This is also true for "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana," though in
typical Eco humor it is also the project of the novel. The story relates
the twilight days of Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni, a 60ish antiquarian book
dealer, who loses his memory after an accident. Yambo wakes the morning of
April 15, 1991, to discover that he doesn't know his name but can remember
every word of every book he has read. So when Yambo's doctor asks him what
came to mind as he regained consciousness, he replies, "When Gregor Samsa
woke up one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into an
enormous insect" -- the first sentence of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." And
when Yambo is told he is about to meet his wife, whom he can't remember, he
says, "What if I mistake her for a hat?" riffing on Oliver Sacks' book
about neurology. "You'll have to forgive me," Yambo explains. "I can't seem
to say anything that comes from the heart. I don't have feelings, I only
have memorable sayings."

If only all of this literary straw man were funny! Sadly, the opposite is
true. Yambo, stuffed with Augustine and Poe and constantly spouting
literary quotations about fog (the primary metaphor for his amnesia),
remains an annoying pedant for most of the novel's 400-plus pages.

"The Mysterious Flame" is structured in three parts. In the first, Yambo
drifts through Milan, wondering whether he's had an affair with his
beautiful young Polish assistant and thus betrayed his wife and family. In
Part II, he returns to his childhood home, Solara, and reads (or rereads)
his favorite childhood books. Although this activity does not spark Yambo's
memory, it allows Eco to summarize a vast and eclectic childhood reading
list, including "The Count of Monte Cristo," "The Three Musketeers," Flash
Gordon comic books, Fascist songbooks and piles of magazines brimming with
1940s pop culture.

"The Mysterious Flame" is billed as an "illustrated novel," and it is only
in the sense that pictures of Queen Loana, a sexy Italian comic book
character, and dozens of other images are reproduced in its pages. For
Italian readers, with a connection to such memorabilia, "The Mysterious
Flame" may be sweetly nostalgic; as Yambo says of his reading binge, "I had
not relived my childhood so much as that of a generation." For Americans,
it will best be appreciated as a veiled memoir of Eco's boyhood.

Indeed, the great shame of Eco's novel is that it's not just a straight
memoir. The strongest sections come in Part III, where Yambo, having
suffered a stroke and slipped into a coma, finally remembers some of his
past, specifically his socialist grandfather's bitter experiences under
Fascism and the moment he first saw his adolescent love, Lila Saba,
activating a lifetime of sexual desire and Catholic guilt. Although these
incidents cannot be proved as autobiographical, they feel so and bind
together Eco's major themes of memory, history and fantasy. They also are
written with verve. Gone is the cloying conceit of a character "lost" in
books. Of course, Eco is that lost man (he is said to have a 30,000-volume
library), and the passages of a wartime boyhood must be his, for they lack
the hyper-researched prose style of his other historical novels.

Daphne du Maurier wrote, "All autobiography is self-indulgent." Eco must
believe this or feel memoirs are for the imminently dead. Otherwise, he
would have dumped this pseudo-Proustian project and written from the heart
about his earliest, most impressionable years. We only can hope that, given
his vast erudition and richly experienced life, he eventually will.

Tamara Straus is the former editor in chief of Zoetrope: All-Story
magazine.

URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
/c/a/2005/06/05/RVGIQCVG7Q1.DTL