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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Umberto Eco
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Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory-he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image: that of his first love.
A fascinating, abundant new novel-wide-ranging, nostalgic, funny, full of heart-from the incomparable Eco.
- Sales Rank: #495816 in Books
- Brand: Harvest Books
- Published on: 2006-06-05
- Released on: 2006-06-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.19" w x 5.31" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 469 pages
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
Guidall gives a polished, Masterpiece Theatre–worthy sheen to Eco's odd, funny tale of Yambo, a man who discovers that while remembering the plots and details of all the books and films he's ever read or seen, he has no recollection of his own life or his name. His sonorous tones are soothing, lending Eco's prose a certain hushed aura, but there is something strangely off about the marriage of the Italian author's intellectual mystery story and Guidall's rolling British cadences. It is as if Guidall's Oxbridge enunciation were thought necessary to gussy up Eco's novel, something it is distinctly not in need of. Overemoting, Guidall turns Yambo into a ham actor rather than a slightly comic figure befuddled by a world full of mysterious and alluring signs. Guidall does do a solid job capturing the quicksilver changes in emotional temperature of the volatile protagonist, who is unable to comprehend the confusing new world he finds himself in. Even in this, though, Guidall is more like an actor professing befuddlement than someone actually finding himself disoriented by his mind's empty spaces.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Eco, known for his philosophical musings, witty allusions, historical and literary criticism, and play with the postmodern world of signs and semiotics, writes with deep intelligence in this novel of ideas. For those who haven’t memorized Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Queen Loana is, at heart, a simple detective story. Awaking from a coma, a man seeks to recover his identity (not to become a better person, as the more clichéd version might have it, but to relive the memory of Italians who lived under Mussolini).
Readers interested in literary allusions and the fine line between fantasy and reality will find Queen Loana both fun and erudite; Eco knows just as much about Fred Astaire as he does Marcel Proust. A survey of Italian pop culture of the 1930s and ‘40s, together with recollections of Piedmontese Italy and Fascism, will delight those interested in the intersection of history and literature. Yet this time Eco’s esoteric musings may have maimed the narrative. A few critics accused Eco of embracing semiotics over storytelling, of introducing narrative possibilities with no resolution, of over intellectualizing, period. Connections between Yambo’s reading and the small revelations relating to his sexual awakening, Catholic guilt, and wartime experiences fail to cohere. As a result, some reviewers saw Yambo as an abstruse, "annoying pedant" (San Francisco Chronicle). Others, noting biographical parallels between Yambo and Eco, wondered why the author chose not to write a straight memoir that came more from the heart than the brain. Despite these flaws, readers interested in following one man’s journey through his befuddled psyche will not be disappointed—as long as you’re up on your literature and pop culture.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
119 of 123 people found the following review helpful.
"Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death
By Lonya
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
66 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
Eco at His Best & Worst
By Timothy Haugh
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.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Richly Eco
By Robert Busko
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.
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