This is alternately lovely and very slow going. The sheer detail of WWi and post-war Italian cultural detail can be overwhelming - the personal interactions rendered sweetly and accurately - the one truly war-related story chilling. This is a late Eco book (maybe his last?) and you can see his semiotic love of detail and icon throughout.

However, the ending was ultimately unsatisfying if relatively expected.

In brief, the story concerns a man who has had a stroke, and who may or may not be recovering from it, or merely remembering his life while dying of it. Hard to tell, even at the end, which way Eco means us to understand the circumstance.

The book does have some wonderful illustrations of those cultural artifacts the protagonist finds as he excavates his childhood, and more illustrations as he presents his more and more extraordinary dreams. Beautifully printed even in the trade paperback edition.

"Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what has passed is past." So says Yambo, an amnesiac who wakes up with no personal memories but with a retention of all the knowledge he has learned out of books. This becomes a hindrance to his very identity, so he delves back into all of the media he has ever encountered to reclaim what once "made" him: academic material, children's books, pulp and comic books, his stamp collections.

Yet Yambo must ultimately come to a more holistic self-identity, greater than the sum of its parts. He is an antiquarian who sells rare books, an embodiment of the way we try to grasp and preserve the past as something sacred. And it is, to some extent, but memory and identity are both necessarily dynamic and not tied to media or any other object. That is the "mysterious flame" of the title - as emotions and perceptions shift and grow, which is the "reality," what you experienced first or what you experienced upon reflection?

The illustrations were great; it made my reading experience feel more like looking through a scrapbook and added to a sense of memory as a multimedia and complex experience. If other reviewers would like to complain that Yambo's re-discovery of his childhood mementos made for a boring read, perhaps they should reconsider Eco's point of these scenes. Our identity is less tied up in what *happens* to us and more to how we react emotionally and grow during and after the experience.

Identity's a funny thing. Yambo's amnesia forces him to, artificially, reconstruct his sense of self - but at the same time, it evokes a mental and emotional growth in him as he works through this process, making himself into something both nostalgic and new. ( )

Für wen wurde dieses Buch geschrieben?: Es tut mir sehr leid, wenn ich über Meister Eco in diesem Fall keine positive Meinung habe. Die Geschichte des 60jährigen Mannes, der sein biografisches Gedächtnis verloren hat und versucht, dies auf dem Landsitz seiner Kindheit und Jugend wiederzufinden, ist sehr interessant und vielversprechend. Die Handlung beginnt auch fließend. Wenn dann aber bereits nach ein paar Seiten ständig Zitate aus mir unbekannten Büchern angeführt werden und Beschreibungen von Bildern, Comics und Büchern folgen, die wahrscheinlich die wenigsten von uns kennen, wird es doch arg anstrengend. Interessant sind die Schlussfolgerungen, wie die Kindheit und Jugend (nicht nur die der Hauptfigur, sondern vieler italienischer Kinder und Jugendlicher) zu Zeiten Mussolinis ausgesehen haben könnte. Aber der Gesamteindruck hinterlässt bei mir persönlich einen negativen Nachgeschmack, da es für Nichtitaliener und Nachkriegsgeborene einfach zu schleppend vorangeht. Manche Seiten habe ich einfach nur überflogen, da ich mir keine Mühe machen wollte, zehn Zeilen Comic-Laute zu lesen. Dieses Buch ist wirklich kein Vergleich zu Ecos Klassikern.

It took me a long time to get into this book and I really didn't quite get into it -- although by the end I was following it avidly. It is a bit too much of a "boys" book. Too much longing for a past that wasn't as it might be recollected. ( )

I actually didn't manage to finish this, something of a disappointment with regard to an author of this caliber. But being a book largely about a man going through things in an attic, it has all the suspense and interest of attending a relative's slide show. I think in casting this material in the form of a novel, Eco really missed the boat. What it needs to be is an interactive web site where people can sort through the attic's contents themselves according to their own interests -- viewing pictures, reading stories, and listening to audio clips. ( )