The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
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Book Summary Information

Author: Umberto Eco
Translator: Geoffrey Brock
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-06-05
ISBN: 0156030438
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Mariner Books

Book Reviews of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Book Review: Sumptuous Fare for Lovers of Old Books
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a book for devoted book lovers. Any bibliophile who dreams of inheriting an attic full of antique books should find The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana to be sumptuous fare. After a medical incident (a stroke) that leaves him in a state of partial amnesia, Yambo caresses book after lovely old book in an attempt to trigger lost memories of his early life. Along the way, readers are treated to reviews of rare books we wish we might be lucky enough to stumble upon along with color graphics of their covers. This book evokes the odor of library dust and printer's ink. I luxuriated in every page. The only shortcoming is a pat ending that didn't do the book justice and cut the book off at its ankles. If you are looking for an adventure story (intellectual or otherwise) this book may disappoint. But if you have a passion for the look, feel, and smell of old books, dive right in and enjoy Eco at his introspective best.

Summary of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory-he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image: that of his first love.

A fascinating, abundant new novel-wide-ranging, nostalgic, funny, full of heart-from the incomparable Eco.
(20050601)
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

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