The ANNOTICO Report

Umberto Eco at 73 who lives in Milan, is in New York at the moment at the
beginning of a US tour that will include Los Angeles to promote his fifth
and newest novel,  "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana".

This novel,  like the others comprises both traditional narrative
storytelling and inventive discourses on arcane subjects while drawing on
philosophy, history and literature.

The approach was cast in Eco's 1983 debut, "The Name of the Rose," in which
he used a murder mystery to explore the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The
Middle Ages also gave rise to "Foucault's Pendulum," in which contemporary
characters uncover centuries-old plots by the Knights Templar, and to
"Baudolino," about the days of Barbarossa, who fought the papacy in central
Europe in the 12th century.

Eco advanced to the 1600s for the "The Island of the Day Before," which
imagined the race among navigators to establish longitude, and thus measure
distance and time, which would give the discovering country an advantage in
the battle to build colonial empires.

In "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana", Eco explores the nature of a life
separated from its context. Antiquarian book dealer Giambattista "Yambo"
Bodoni suffers a stroke and awakens from the fog of a coma to discover he
has lost the part of his memory that holds personal experiences. He has no
idea who he is; his wife and two daughters are strangers, and the route
from the hospital to his own house is a tourist's adventurous trek.

An Eco novel considers identity: an individual's and a generation's.

Los Angeles Times
By Scott Martelle
Times Staff Writer
June 13, 2005

NEW YORK — Umberto Eco settles into a couch in the second-floor den of
Midtown Manhattan's Morgans Hotel and pulls the stub of an unlit cigar from
his mouth. After smoking for most of his adult life, he began cutting back
about six months ago yet can't quite leave the habit of touch behind. He's
not even sure he wants to leave smoking behind, having read somewhere that
those with Alzheimer's are disproportionately nonsmokers, suggesting
nicotine as a guarantor of memory. And memory, Eco believes, defines the
human soul.

Stop smoking, he jokes, and risk losing yourself.

"If there is something that we call soul, that's memory — it makes up your
identity," Eco, 73, says, his voice twisted by a thick Italian accent and
interrupted by quick, explosive chortles. "All your befores, all your
afters — without memory you are an animal. You have no human soul. Even for
a believer, you cannot go to hell without memory. Why to suffer so much if
you don't know why you suffer? It doesn't make sense. If, in time, you lose
your memory, there's no meaning in paradise and no meaning in hell."

Memory lies at the heart of Eco's new novel, "The Mysterious Flame of Queen
Loana," which has brought him from his Milan home to New York for the start
of a book tour that includes stops in L.A. this weekend.

In the novel, Eco explores the nature of a life separated from its context.
Antiquarian book dealer Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni suffers a stroke and
awakens from the fog of a coma to discover he has lost the part of his
memory that holds personal experiences. He has no idea who he is; his wife
and two daughters are strangers, and the route from the hospital to his own
house is a tourist's adventurous trek.

He recalls quotations from books — he initially tells his doctor he is
Arthur Gordon Pym, an Edgar Allan Poe character — but can't discern which
women he encounters are lovers from what his wife assures him was a
licentious past.

Yambo's wife, a psychologist, suggests he return to his childhood home, an
estate in a rural village in northwest Italy, and use the archives of his
youth to re-establish himself. So begins a reconstruction that cannot work
because Yambo is now building a life from the outside rather than living it
from the inside; it's like the difference between observing life and
experiencing it.

Still, memories revive and the strain of encountering a past he had
repressed — a youthful moral test during World War II — bring him both to
revelation and a renewed darkness that might or might not be death.

In the process, Eco slowly builds a fictional biography not of a character
but of a generation, and illustrates it with youthful literary touchstones
from the 1930s — Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless, Queen Loana and
Mandrake the Magician, the Phantom and Mickey Mouse. Disney's "Mickey Mouse
Runs His Own Newspaper" slipped past the Italian Fascist censors, and
Mickey's pronouncements about the freedom of the press alerted the young
Yambo (and Eco) that the written word had more potential than simple
propaganda.

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is Eco's fifth novel, and like the
others it comprises both traditional narrative storytelling and inventive
discourses on arcane subjects while drawing on philosophy, history and
literature.

The approach was cast in Eco's 1983 debut, "The Name of the Rose," in which
he used a murder mystery to explore the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The
Middle Ages also gave rise to "Foucault's Pendulum," in which contemporary
characters uncover centuries-old plots by the Knights Templar, and to
"Baudolino," about the days of Barbarossa, who fought the papacy in central
Europe in the 12th century.

Eco advanced to the 1600s for the "The Island of the Day Before," which
imagined the race among navigators to establish longitude, and thus measure
distance and time, which would give the discovering country an advantage in
the battle to build colonial empires.

In the new novel, Eco stays in the relative present, reaching only back to
the 1930s for his tale of a childhood lived in war. The research was more
personal — Eco spent World War II in a small village near Turin. "They were
not dropping bombs, but the partisan war was going on so we got to avoid
the bullets going around us, not from above," Eco says.

Eco dipped into his own reassembled library of children's books,
antiquarian volumes and Fascist propaganda for the mementos included in the
book.

"All during my adult life, every time I could in a flea market I re-set up
my original library," Eco says, adding that more recent Internet searches
helped him fill the gaps. "Through the Internet, I succeeded in
reconstructing my stamp collection of 1943. More or less I have found
exactly the same stamps I had in my collection…. I have spent all my adult
years continuously going back to my childhood …. I consider always the
adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood."

Other elements of the novel, he says, were borrowed from the lives of
friends, including a crucial and harrowing story line about Yambo's
involvement in an encounter between German soldiers and Italian partisans.

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" began with a flameout. Eco had
contemplated writing an autobiography about growing up in Mussolini's Italy
but found five years ago that a friend had beaten him to the punch. "I
said, 'I hate you! You have stopped me, I can't do the same,' " Eco says a
few days after the hotel interview, speaking to a packed house at
Manhattan's 92nd Street Y.

An encounter with another friend, though, jump-started the idea when the
concept of memory came up in the conversation.

"I started to muse, that could be the start — a man who loses his memory,"
Eco says. "Not an autobiography but an objective biography of somebody
else, and maybe of a generation."

Eco viewed the project as the inverse of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of
Things Past," in which memory propels the narrative. "The very fact that I
couldn't, like Proust, return to my personal memory" laid the groundwork.
"That the character has to deal only with the objective memories makes his
a reconstruction that is collective and generational."

Eco's physique has the soft roundness of a life well lived, his eyes sharp
behind large-frame glasses. He is known primarily as a novelist and freely
spices his conversation with literary references. But he is also a highly
regarded and widely published expert on semiotics, the study of symbols and
signs, which he teaches at Italy's University of Bologna.

Sitting in the hotel den, with its genteel décor of leather and wood, Eco
says he was surprised that the novel had even been translated after it
first appeared in Italy last year.

"It speaks of Italy and a generation of memories," Eco says, adding that he
told his foreign publishers he "would not be offended" if they passed on
the book. They didn't. "The foreign publishers loved the book, and in the
three countries in which it has been published — Germany, France and Spain
— the reaction has been very, very positive."

Eco hopes the universality of memory, and curiosity about other cultures,
may give the book a boost in the U.S.

"Through the book, foreign readers discover the story of another country,"
Eco says. "After all, we had never been to Macondo but when Gabriel García
Márquez wrote '100 Years of Solitude,' we learned something about Macondo."

Yet the sense of nostalgia for lost childhood, lost innocence, may prove
more significant.

Like Vladimir Nabokov, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with equating
life as a candle flicker between two abysses of darkness, Eco writes in his
new novel of life as a song. Without memory, the notes follow no path, each
existing in its own moment, and the song is no longer a song. And without
memory, each moment of life just a free-floating note.

"Literature, like philosophy, is always a meditation on death," Eco says,
still toying with the unlit cigar. "Otherwise, why to write?"

*

Eco appearances

Where: Mark Taper Auditorium, Richard J. Riordan Central Library, 630 W.
5th St.
When: 3 p.m. Saturday (event is full, but standby tickets might be
available beginning one hour before the event).
Contact: (213) 228-7000

Also

Where: Dutton's Beverly Hills, 447 N. Canon Drive
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
Contact: (310) 281-0997
 

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