Umberto Eco
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)
Author: Umberto Eco (translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock)
Genre: Literary Fiction
Plot Summary:
Yambo is a sixtyish dealer in rare books who wakes from a coma with only his public memory of things he has learned like languages, literature and history, but his personal memory of family, lovers and childhood is gone. The first section of this book is an exploration of how our memories shape us and our futures and how tenuous our own identity is. In order to regain his memory, Yambo journeys to his childhood home. In this second, very lengthy part of the book, he meticulously explores the comics, pulp fiction, songs and stories that made up his youth. Flares of recognition do come, like "mysterious flames," but these only signal that Yambo remembers something; they do not return that memory to him. In the final section of the book, Yambo has another incident and falls into a coma where his memories begin flooding back, mixed with the pulp memories of his youth.
Geographical Setting: Milan and Solara, Italy
Time Period: Present day with flashbacks to the 1930s & 40s.
Appeal Characteristics:
The main appeal of this book is the precision of the prose and the beauty of Eco’s words to create a mood. There are many references to classical works of literature which will delight the well-read reader. Told in the first person, the reader becomes intimate with Yambo’s thoughts and feelings, but other characters are developed merely by his memories and interactions with them and are therefore not always fully formed. There is an extremely heavy emphasis placed on describing the popular works of Yambo’s Italian youth – comics, children’s literature, popular songs and pulp fiction. Unfortunately for the American reader, many of these things are unfamiliar, and the descriptions can become very tedious for the casual reader, but may appeal greatly to those people interested in them. These lengthy descriptive passages slow the pace of the narrative to a crawl at times, only to have it pick up again as Yambo relives a childhood memory or interacts with his family and friends. The tone is dreamy and hypnotic and is well suited to this tale of memory and seeking one’s identity.
Similar Authors: John Updike (for the precision of prose); Arundhati Roy (for the dreamy descriptive quality)
Red Flags: none
|top|
|
