topics:  | fiction | italy

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