Ever the didactic professor - even when wielding the novelist's pen - Umberto Eco explores how memory serves to lead us out the the metaphysical fog that often enshrouds us. "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." Eco manages to take this plot device and weave a tale that is a very personal recollection of what it must have been like for him to grow up in the Italy of World War II. Political intrigue often emerges from Yambo's fog-bound memory as images from his childhood trigger nostalgic excursions through the past.
Hovering over the entire enterprise is Yambo's unrequited love for the unattainable object of a high school crush - Lili, the memory of whose face he struggles to recalls as he lies dying in a comatose state. An initial cerebral incident had left him bereft of personal memories. Back home in his ancestral home of Solara, he slowly regains a sense of perspective and history through the books, records, movie posters and comic books he discovered sequestered throughout the villa. His final discovery of a priceless original Shakespeare folio triggers his ultimate cerebral vascular accident. The final chapters take the reader inside the mind of the dying Yambo as he speeds through a dizzying kaleidoscope of real and imagined images - all the while groping for the elusive image of Lili's face. These final chapters - and Yambo's final apocalyptic thoughts and memories - are presented (in typical Eco style) as a parody of the Book of Revelation.
The novel is a moving and irreverent conceit in which Eco opens the kimona and shows us not only his special mind but also his complex heart.
Enjoy "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana."
Al
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