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In search of a personal history

By MARK E. HAYES
Published May 29, 2005

THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA

By Umberto Eco

Harcourt, $27.00, 469 pp

Reviewed by MARK E. HAYES

Poor Yambo may have lost his soul. What is for certain, however, is that he has lost his memory - or at least part of it. He can remember every bit of literature, music, and film the old Yambo might have come across, but the new Yambo has forgotten his own name, his family, and his personal past. He describes this new state of existence as, "My life as an encyclopedia."

Such is the curious predicament for the narrator of Umberto Eco's new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. For the erudite and eclectic Eco, who, despite his fame as the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, still describes himself as a professor of semiotics at the University of Milan, this new novel is unexpectedly contemporary, fun, and colorful. Mysterious Flame burns through much of the history and popular culture of the West in a vigorous 400 or so pages, each one translated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock.

Our amnesiac hero Yambo, aging elegantly into his senior years, is a successful dealer in rare books, and the inhabitant of a pleasant if placid life, punctuated by Gitanes and the occasional casual affair. His biographical essence now erased by a stroke, he still retains his day-to-day skills (smoking, flirting) along with an endless mountain of trivia. The first section of the novel is largely comic as Yambo copes with the embarrassing and bizarre circumstance of being a stranger in his own life. He's not in Dante's Hell, exactly - call it Heck. At the urging of his family, Yambo retires to the old family home in the hills of northern Italy. Perhaps he can reconstruct his identity by going through the endless piles of books, magazines, newspapers, and records his grandfather never threw out.

In the novel's second section, set in what in effect becomes a museum of Yambo's childhood, the narrator begins to feel stirrings of who he is - but it is little more than a flame of excitement at the description in a pulp novel, a panel in a comic book, or the chorus of a popular song. Caught between the fog of his amnesia and the flame of his identity (or maybe it's the other way around), always with an eye on his blood pressure, Yambo reads his way closer and closer to the reality of who he is. Up and down the purgatorial corridors of memory he wanders. And wanders. Just when the reader may be tiring of all the days in the attic and the long catalogs of materials sorted through, the novel swings into its stunning third act, and all Yambo's homework pays off.

As much as anything, in its more serious moments, The Mysterious Flame is concerned with the foggy distinctions between fantasy and reality, between childhood and adulthood, and, as Yambo sometimes sadly sees himself, a lifetime of reading versus a lifetime of living. What Yambo finds at the end of his days, is that - fact or fiction - his life was made all the richer by his moving between those two ways of understanding the world, or, as he puts it, out of his books, "To build a world that is all mine." A world like that, suggests Eco, might be something very much like paradise. It might even get Yambo his soul back.

In addition to telling an extraordinary story in a delightfully ornamented manner, Eco's novel is illustrated as well, with approximately 100 reproductions of prints and photographs, tucked in and around the narrative. These visual elements, assembled and arranged by the author himself, invite the reader to browse along with Yambo, to daydream and recall Flash Gordon, Pinocchio, Terry and the Pirates, Benito Mussolini, Cyrano de Bergerac, Josephine Baker, and, of course, Queen Loana. In a word, this novel is fun.

- Mark E. Hayes is a teacher and writer from Miami. His reviews and commentary can be heard regularly online at wdna.org.

[Last modified May 28, 2005, 09:19:02]