Open Writing

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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
By Umberto Eco
Harcourt. 480 pages. $27.00

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a novel about an antique book dealer who wakes up after a stroke unable to remember anything except the things he's read. Written by Italian academic Umberto Eco, it was first published in Italy in 2004 and made available in English in the following year.

I bought the book on the basis of my enjoyment of two of Eco's other novels,The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.

To be honest, despite the glowing reviews on its cover, I didn't think it would be all that interesting. When I finished it this morning I was in no doubt that The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is one of the best books I've ever read.

The story's protagonist, Yambo, is 60 years old. He has a wife, Paola, two daughters, grandchildren, a respectable business and a beautiful Polish assistant called Sibilla.

Yambo is told that he was an unfaithful husband, so at the beginning of the novel he finds himself in the awkward situation of not knowing if he and Sibilla are lovers.

"She might still be in mid-affair, maybe she wanted to greet me with tu and my first name...Maybe she wanted to throw her arms around my neck -- who knows how much she too might have suffered in recent weeks".

At Paola's suggestion Yambo leaves the city and goes to recuperate at his boyhood home in the countryside. It is when he reaches Solara that Eco's writing really becomes interesting.

Yambo spends months searching through the books and other papers stored in the labyrinthine attic of the big old house, attempting to reawaken his memory and reconstruct his formative years.

The story is set in 1991, which means that Yambo was a boy when Italy was ruled by Mussolini, a fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. This enables Eco to explore the impact of censorship and propaganda on the reading material of an entire generation of Italian children.

Eco was born in 1932, making him Yambo's contemporary and suggesting that The Mysterious Flame is also a memoir of the author's childhood reading. I particularly enjoyed this part of the novel as an evocation of a bygone age of Italian popular culture.

Unable to remember who he was as a boy, Yambo is left asking questions about his support for fascism, his religious beliefs and his first encounters with the opposite sex.

Reading through his school books he discovers that his attitudes changed over a relatively short period but that he doesn't know why. This becomes one of the central issues of the story.

On the book jacket I see that an unnamed reviewer for The Observer has described this work as "philosophy dressed as fiction." Eco certainly gives the reader a lot to think about.

Every reader will take different things from The Mysterious Flame, but for me one of the strongest points was how much of our memory is external to us, composed of words circulating in books and comics and popular music. Yambo feels that he has lost himself without his personal memories, but he is more like an apple that has had its core removed.

Despite forgetting his 60 years of life he is still a product of the 20th century because he remembers what he has read.

Also notably The Mysterious Flame records the literature of a time when, despite extensive European Imperialism, the average European knew far less about the world outside than we do today.

It was still possible to tell stories of explorers in unmapped regions, and suspend ones disbelief for tales of eternally beautiful warrior queens hidden in the jungle. The non-European was most definitely treated as "other;" as is shown by what must be one of the book's most shocking and disturbing illustrations, a reproduction of a postcard depicting an Abyssinian woman trussed up in a parcel.

Eco does not shy away from the racism that was a part of Italian popular culture at that period, but he also shows how ordinary Italians reacted when they did meet people quite unlike themselves. Nobody could call the author unsubtle.

Quite unusually for a novel The Mysterious Flame is amply illustrated with color reproductions of book covers, comics, magazine covers, posters and postcards. Eco never points to the pictures but they are integral to the reading experience and this work would be poorer without them.

Several montages, put together by Eco himself, dominate the concluding pages of The Mysterious Flame, further demonstrating how important images are to this book.

I did not expect the plot to develop in the way that it did, so I will not spoil things for other readers by ruining any surprises.

At first when I came to the final stage of the novel I was disappointed because I wanted the central segment to continue for longer. Yet I think this last stage is what makes The Mysterious Flame a masterpiece of world literature.

Eco successfully carries off passages that would seem tricksy and affectated if written by lesser authors. The end result is a moving realism that is never marred by sentimentality.