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"erudite…A dual pleasure for the literary-minded"

Synopsis
Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood. His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel.

Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school and morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image - the schoolgirl he never forgot. Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves and other printed ephemera, "The Mysterious Flame" is a fascinating and hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

The Tedious Self-Indulgence of Professor Eco, 10 Nov 2006

By	molondas - See all my reviews

On p.252 of this novel GianBattista Bodoni, the first person narrator, says "It was a ramshackle story, no part of which held water ... an incredibly slipshod narrative that lacks both charm and psychology". Bodoni's comments refer to an old comic book called "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana", but apply equally to Eco's novel of the same name, which is a scruffy, self-indulgent, tedious homage to the literature and art of Bodoni's childhood. In this, Bodoni is Eco's mouthpiece, and Eco takes full advantage in an exhaustive and nostalgic journey through the major cultural influences of his early years, and the fantasy worlds they helped him, as a child, to build. Given the narrator's comments about the Queen Loana comic book, it is just possible that Eco is playing a trick on his readers - by leading them through a fiction that is as ramshackle, slipshod and charmless as the comic book Bodoni describes. Ha, ha, the joke's on you reader. If so, that would just confirm the vanity and self-importance that are this novel's hallmarks. I think the truth is more mundane, if rather puzzling - Eco has produced an absolute stinker.

Bodoni is trying to recover his affective and emotional memory following a stroke. The stroke has not affected his encyclopedic memory - he can remember words and facts from all the books, newspapers, films, posters, comics etc he has read or seen. But he doesn't recognise his wife or family, and cannot recall anything that is held in the memorey by its association with emotional states (love, political and ethical convictions, tastes and preferences etc.). So he goes on a journey to his childhood home, to browse through an attic full of mementoes in an attempt to recover his memory and thereby find out who he really is.

It's a tried and tested formula for exploring notions of personal identity, in this case by relating the formative experience of books to emotional and personal development. BUT - and it's a big BUT - Bodoni's character is unconvincing, self-obsessed and dull. The long, middle section is little more than a list of the books he finds in the attic with endlessly repetitive questions suggested by the characters he encounters in them - "perhaps that's why I had felt ...", "was this the source of the quote?"... maybe this, perhaps that, possibly this. It is truly tedious, and I was tempted to give up several times.

Once he starts to recover his memory, there are some better passages recounting a key incident from his experience of World War II. It is at this point that Eco remembers the basic principles of writing fiction - you have to tell a story, rather than write a rambling monologue.
Unfortunately, the improvement is a blip, and Bodoni returns to the suffocating hyperindividualism of his tunnel-like vision as the "theatrical" denouement approaches.

I didn't give up on this book, I managed to finish it. I was curious to know if it could remain so poor to the end. After all Eco's first book, The Name of the Rose, is a classic. But to no avail. Its only fascination for me is that it is one of the worst books I've ever read.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

An Accessible Eco as Graphic Novelist, 12 Jul 2005

By	Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Hardcover)

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a side of Umberto Eco that you haven't seen before . . . and I think you will like it . . . especially if you found the references in The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum to be a little too much for you.

The book's premise is much like that of The Arabian Nights, an excuse to introduce an interesting story teller who unravels a fascinating tale that could go on endlessly. In this case, the device is a stroke which causes Yambo to lose his memory of most everything (including his name) except what he has read. Recuperating from his stroke, Yambo receives hints from his wife and best friend about what he's like . . . and discovers that he has a weakness for the ladies. What does that mean about his relationship with his beautiful, young assistant?

Soon frustrated by his memoryless life in Milan, Yambo goes back to his childhood home to see if anything there resurrects any memories. He discovers a house and attic full of the past through which he relives the history of Italians his age. Later, a second stroke restores his memory, and he relives his life as it happened . . . with a little fantasy attached.

It's a witty commentary on the vacuity of the "official" record of our times to see how little of Yambo's life the effects of his life captured.

For those who aren't Italian, the book offers deep and thoughtful look at what it meant to live in Italy under the Fascists. At times, it seemed like the musical comedy version of Gunter Grass's books about Nazi Germany.

The book dazzles most, however, with its many full color illustrations from books, magazines, posters and other cultural icons. These images make the mental pictures conjured up by Eco's words stronger and more lasting. Be sure to check out the section on sources of citations and references that begin on 451. These details will add to your enjoyment of the illustrations.

As I read the book, I wished that I knew a few more languages (especially German and Italian), but most of the references were either easy to appreciate or covered in context by another reference that I understood. Naturally, some Ph.D. student will write a dissertation that firmly fixes all of the references, but that will be too stuffy to read for this breezy, charming effort.

What is life? What is memory? What is reality? These fundamental questions are all beautifully addressed in both sublime (images of perfect love) and the mundane (relieving oneself among the vineyard rows.

It's great fun, and I highly recommend this book to you. It's the high brow's perfect beach read!

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