The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

This is a surprisingly accessible novel compared to others by this author. It's almost autobiographical and is more pop culture focused on the 20th century than historical. Yambo, the main character, is only about a month older than Eco himself. He awakens in 1991 from an accident to discover he has amnesia, which provides the perfect pretext for Eco to review Italian memorabilia from the 1930s onward as Yambo searches for a trigger that will return his past to him. When Yambo's memory does begin to return, he discovers the contrast between what he's tried to piece together and what actually happened.

I thought at first that this would have been even more fun if the character (and Eco) had been raised in a culture I could relate to, but show more then I would have missed the exposure to learning about Italian childhood in the 1940s when mass media was being manipulated to serve Il Duce. Yambo is searching for the "reverberation of forgotten delights", but this alone isn't much to hang a plot on. In "Island of the Day Before", something similar happened where the main character was mostly just studious and we were treated to all sorts of history lessons. In that instance there was a fair hope of at least absorbing something educational. Some readers will find the travail more tiring this time, since it's difficult to imagine the same benefit arising from a close study of Italian propaganda from the early 20th century. I strongly suspect we're being treated to a tour through Eco's own childhood and teenage favourites as he indulges in personal nostalgia. Along the way he treats us to all sorts of illustrations from the comics, stamp collections and movie posters of the period.

A significant mystery lingers: we don't find out - or perhaps Yambo never finds out - how he transitioned from a young man who identified with Cyrano and idealized his first love into an adult who has a dozen casual dalliances behind his wife's back. That leaves me to speculate that Yambo is a man who has lived all his life in the past. When it's taken from him, this makes it a kind of double amnesia. He really has no life that matters to him without it. show less

Umberto Eco always puzzles me, yet I read his novels whenever I find them. This novel is no exception, puzzling and intriguing, exploring questions about memory, storytelling, imagination, and the construction of reality. First, the narrator Yambo has a stroke which leaves him with stories and images from the literature he has read, but with no knowledge of his own past. Later, after a second stroke, he recovers his memory but cannot communicate and imagines a story line that may or may not resolve his life’s desires.
Eco says that we need our memories to know who we are and what to do. If we don’t know our past, what is the meaning of the present? How are we to know what we want for the future? As Yambo thinks, I recognize this show more image that I see in a flea market, but I don’t know if I like it or if I want to escape from it. Should I buy it or leave it? I don’t know. His wife even has to tell him what food he likes. Embarrassingly, he doesn’t know if he’s having an affair with his assistant or not.
He returns to his childhood home, where books and papers from his past have been stored. He hopes to recreate his past, but finds that it just raises more questions. When he reads the fascist Italian propaganda from his school days, it seems at first a happy memory, but reading more he sees that the reality of fascism led to his disillusionment. He realizes that the consciousness of his youth was shaped by the comic books he loved to read, which may have been more influential than the slanted education he received in schools. That consciousness he acquired from eclectic – and unreliable – sources seems to be part of his mature life.
This raises a question that we all face if we choose to think about it: how much of our current consciousness, values, beliefs comes from comic books, television, games that we encountered and continue to encounter as adults? How much comes from government, schools, religion, families and the formal sources that society entrusts with forming our minds? And setting the story in the period of Italian fascism and its aftermath, Eco implicitly asks if societies entrust the formation of consciousness to institutions that have their own flawed values. In the current social struggle for the minds of people in Canada (and the USA and elsewhere), questions about trust in social institutions are fundamental to both liberals and conservatives (as they always have been to radicals.)
It's interesting when this story moves into Yambo’s recovered memories. It becomes a time when he can relive the pleasures of his life and imagine a happy future without having to worry about time or what’s happening with his body in care. It becomes a positive way to exist in a coma, unlike the endless frustration that I would have imagined otherwise.
Woven into all this internal reflection are a number of intriguing stories that reflect on Yambo’s life. The story he finds about his grandfather’s treatment by local fascists and the revenge he executes after the war are hard to forget. His own role in the death of some German soldiers and the saving of some partisans become part of the guilt he feels through his life, although he’s forgotten the incident itself. Leading through the whole narrative is a highly idealized love, which he can realize as a comic-book blaze of glory in his detached state. But he says, “I want to know who I am. Life may be indistinguishable from a dream, but in life we have to choose to believe in what we see and know.” He does make a choice to reject illusion and live a mature life. Inevitably, or ironically, he can make a choice, but he cannot change the reality of his life.
Like all of Eco’s books, this is a book of philosophy as well as a curious story. It’s puzzling and sometimes frustrating to understand what’s going on in the narrative, but Eco always has something to say that makes the reading stimulating. show less

I read parts of this (I couldn't read the middle hundred pages) as part of a project to read novels with images. Eco calls this "An Illustrated Novel," partly alluding to the comic books that he remembers from his childhood. I found the book intolerable.

1: The narrator's knowledgeable voice

Well-read and scholarly authors, like Canetti or Richard Powers, tend to be praised by people who think they have endless erudition. I think that's a mistaken way to evaluate an author, because no author I know has that really "peregrine" erudition. Eco is limited, and so was Canetti. ("Peregrine" is a word Leopardi used to describe his own learning, and it fits; in my book, only people like Arnaldo Momigliano are genuinely bewilderingly erudite. show more Everyone else is obviously mortal.)

The problem here, aside from readers' reactions, is that Eco himself hows off continuously, unconsciously, happily, as if he wasn't showing off at all. Here's a typical passage. The main character has woken in a hospital, and he can't remember his name.

--
"And yet I did have it on the tip of my tongue. After a moment I offered the most obvious reply.
"My name is Arthur Gordon Pym."
"That isn't your name."
Of course, Pym was someone else.

[Note how coy this is: the name is part of the title of Edgar Allen Poe's only novel. Eco doesn't quite tell us, but alludes to the fact that the name does mean something. He's already done this on the very first page of his book, alluding to Bruges-la-Morte, the most important predecessor of his own book, but not quite telling readers what he's doing. It's a wink and a nod for people in the know.]

"Call me... Ishmael?"
"Your name is not Ishmael. Try harder."

[This is supposed to be comedy, because readers are expected to get this allusion.]

"A word. Like running into a wall. Saying Euclid or Ishmael was easy... I tried to explain. "It doesn't feel like something solid, it's like walking through a fog."
"What's the fog like?" he asked.
"The fog on the bristling hills climbs drizzling up the sky, and down below the mistral howls and whitens the sea... What's the fog like?"

[Again, coy: he's quoting, but this time it isn't at all clear what the source is. It's a puzzle, like on "Mastermind" or NPR.]

"You put me at a disadvantage... I'm only a doctor. And besides, this is April, I can't show you any fog. Today's the twenty-fifth of April."
"April is the cruelest month."

[Another in-joke, which readers will be expected to get. Eco makes sure we know now everyone gets jokes like this:]

"I'm not very well-read, but I think that's a quotation." (pp. 6-7)
--

The book is like this throughout. Eco apparently doesn't think he's boasting, but he is. He also lectures: there are long pages with medical diagnoses, bibliographic citations, historical references, etc. What's intolerable here is that Eco only half-realizes he's showing off. He is also exuberant about all kinds of cultural detritus, and that's great -- it's the semiotician of his early work. I liked pp. 108-110, where he tells us about obscure torture techniques, and then gives us lists of flags, musical instruments, weaponry, heraldry... he has no idea when to stop, which is great. But often what he does is either unconscious boasting, presented as the products of a full imagination, or else professorial lecturing, presented as an interest in the variegated facts of the world.

The impetus to appear scholarly overflows the narration, because the book ends with a long list of sources for the illustrations. This list wasn't necessary: it goes beyond what copyright restrictions would require, and so it becomes a sort of scholarly apparatus, as if it was written by the narrator. It's also, in the end, more showing off.

All this is just one reason I found the book unreadable. The other reason has to do with the images.

2. The images

The use of images is ham-fisted, for at least four reasons:

(A) The use of color.
Eco is lucky -- and nearly unique -- in that his previous sales enabled him to produce this book in full color. It's one of just a few novels with color illustrations, and the fact that they are of good quality means that he can conjure objects of nostalgia differently than, say, Sebald. When Eco's character finds a cocoa tin in an attic, he can show it in full color and detail, and bring it into the present in a way that an author like Sebald couldn't (I don't mean he would have always wanted to, but the option wasn't available). But Eco makes very little use of this; most every object in this book is scanned, at apparently high resolution, and simply presented to us.

(B) Reproducing objects without backgrounds.
There are a few photos of three-dimensional objects in the book, but they are cropped white all around, as in catalogues. The reason for that decision isn't acknowledged in the book; it makes them look like objects in catalogues.

(C) The effect of cropping.
All the other hundreds of illustrations are cropped tightly to the edges of the image or cover, or else they're details. Some are arranged in rows and columns (pp. 138, 140), making them look like illustrations in a reference book. These layout and design choices are again odd, and unremarked by the narrator. Why allude to scholarly or reference works? After all, the narrator is rummaging through boxes and piles of papers in an attic -- he isn't supposed to be preparing a book for publication. In fact, Eco was preparing a book for publication, and that fact intrudes on the fiction. (One image is reproduced with its tattered margins, the way Anne Carson does; that makes it seem precious, but that isn't remarked on either.)

(D) Image manipulation.
The final episode of the book is an hallucination: the narrator imagines himself in a drama with comic book characters. On pp. 422-45, full-page illustrations from comics are matched with facing pages of text. It's the only time in the book where the text isn't full page, because Eco wants to match it to the pictures. From the list of illustrations it's apparent that Eco put these together himself from a number of different comics. They are credited as "montages by the author." But as montages, they're ham-fisted: characters are just pasted together, without even the adjustments that an artist like Erro makes when he does collages of comics. Many of the images have vignetting -- Eco used a blur function in Photoshop or some other application, and it needs to be said -- in the 21st century, when everyone has some photo-editing skills, and in the context of a novel that is all about images -- that he used the blur function very badly. He could have capitalized on this, for example by saying his narrator's mind was blurred in a simple fashion, but he apparently does not think his photo manipulation requires comment. But it does: these images are as awkwardly done as William Gass's graphics in his novel "The Tunnel."

I once had a chance to ask Gass about those illustrations. Why, I wanted to know, do the images all look like mid-1980s computer graphics, with thick outlines and primary colors? Because, he said, the narrator inhabits that world. I think that would have been a good answer if the narrator of "The Tunnel" had a computer, with a graphics program, and was producing images as best he could. But there is no such theme in the book. Instead the illustrations in "The Tunnel" appear the way Eco's illustrations do in "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna": as the products of rudimentary digital skills, which appear to their makers as adequate, but which cannot appear that way to anyone who pays as much attention to images as the authors themselves ask readers to do. show less

I haven't participated in Nanowriomo for a few years, but two of my attempts were similar to this offering by Eco: a novel of stories prompted by books I own, and one of stories prompted by books I have read. There ends the comparison, but maybe if I had added a similar frame to what Eco did here those novels may have proved more promising.

All this being said, this is my least favorite of the Eco books I have read. I got the impression that the author had dragged four or five boxes full of junk out of the attic and he was telling us what every little scrap of paper was all about. Yambo, the protagonist, remembers everything he's ever read, but not much else. Because he's read so much and so widely, there is a wide, ugly ditch (to borrow show more Lessing's phrase) between him and the readers of his story. It is so wide, and so ugly, so as to leave the less-than-ideal reader wondering what the hell he is on about. To be fair, those in the know will really resonate with this, but the majority, I fear, will not.

Near the end of the novel (actually about 110 pages before the end), I was struck by Yambo's apparent uncritical acceptance of Fascist propaganda that they were making Italy great again (this should sound familiar). For I am reading at the same time [[William Shirer]]'s [The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich], which indicates some hesitancy on the part of Mussolini to support Hitler in what he was trying to do. This was an interesting juxtaposition for me. show less

Bizarre and compelling, Umberto Eco has written a wonderful book. Yambo, a 60 year old antiquarian bookseller, wakes from a coma unable to remember his life. Characters, plots and quotes from the books he has read free-wheel through his brain but he doesn't know his wife and children, or what has shaped his life. In an attempt to reconnect with his past he returns to the house where he spent part of his childhood — his grandfather's home where he spent holidays and was evacuated during the war. What follows is a trip through the culture of 1930's/1940's Italy. A feast of comic books; music; books and propaganda.

Lavishly illustrated with memorabilia; nostalgic and descriptive of a childhood, this is a book that feeds the senses. show more Surreal chain of consciousness prose flows effortlessly; building to a culminating dream like sequence. I loved this book, but I can see that it wouldn't be to everybody's taste. show less

Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni, a 60-year-old rare book dealer from Milan, has "paper memory" after suffering a stroke. He has no autobiographical memory—he cannot identify his wife, daughters, or his own past—but he can remember every book, poem, and song he has ever come across. Yambo withdraws to his Solara childhood home at his wife Paola's suggestion. He searches his grandfather's large attic, which is stocked with diaries, comic books, old newspapers, and records.
Yambo recreates his generation's experiences with Catholic guilt, wartime propaganda, and American pop culture icons like Flash Gordon and Fred Astaire by using these artifacts to recreate the world of his childhood in Mussolini's fascist Italy. After a second show more "incident," Yambo experiences a coma during which his real memories resurface.

The book is renowned for its nearly 200 illustrations, which show how culture shapes individual identity and include comic strips, posters, and ads from Eco's own collection. Yambo is used by Eco as a metaphor for a "truly postmodern figure"—someone whose identity is derived more from literature and media than from personal experience.
The title "Mysterious Flame" alludes to a particular Tim Tyler's Luck comic. show less

This is, by far, the best Umberto Eco book I have ever had the opportunity to read. Furthermore, I believe that it is a hallmark of what great modern literature can do. The characters are vivid, the descriptions sublime, and the overall impact and literary value are extreme in their intensity. The main character is a conundrum himself, suffering from memory loss that leaves him to re-examine things in an entirely new light. Through that new light, without foreknowledge, he depicts things originally, creatively, and critically. The story is a roller-coaster ride and the ending is one of the best that I have ever read.

EXCELLENT book. For anyone serious about writing, literature, Eco, or storytelling-- this should be near the top of your show more reading list. show less