Miami Herald // The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco
Searching for himself
An Italian man's amnesia raises philosophical questions about existentialism in Umberto Eco's engaging novel
By Andrew Ervin
THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA. Umberto Eco. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. Harcourt. Illustrated. 464 pages. $28.
In Umberto Eco's novels, including The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, philosophy usually takes precedence over storytelling. The characters serve as archetypes, convenient vehicles for any number of weighty intellectual concepts, and they frequently look more like caricatures than people. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to interact with people, go to Wal-Mart.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana provides further evidence that Eco continues to write some of the most timeless and consistently engaging fiction out there. It's little wonder that his books carry such intellectual weight; he's a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. And while an academic interest in signs, symbols and iconography would weigh down many authors, for Eco the passion serves as a sort of well from which he draws again and again.
Italian sexagenarian Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni wakes up in a hospital to learn that he has a strangely selective form of retrograde amnesia. He can't remember his name or any of the details of life -- his wife, for instance, is totally unrecognizable -- but he can recall just about everything he's ever read. "I saw myself in the mirror. At least I was fairly sure it was me, because mirrors, as everyone knows, reflect what is in front of them. A white, hollow face, a long beard, and two sunken eyes. This is great: I do not know who I am but I find out I am a monster. I would not want to meet me on a deserted road at night. Mr. Hyde."
Eco uses Yambo's condition to raise all sorts of philosophical questions, specifically about the big-e Existentialist notion that being is becoming. Existentialism, you may recall, was the school of thought that reached its zenith in the occupied France of World War II. One idea behind the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and others is that a person's identity, his essence, isn't innate but rather is determined by the choices he makes.
Yambo is a classic Existentialist hero in that he has no essence other than what he is able to recreate for himself using the material possessions around him. He soon returns home to his wife and his rare-books business but his memory has become a pastiche made up of far-flung literary allusions and the swatches of poetry that come to him through the fog of his amnesia.
Despite a close friend's salacious remarks he can't remember if he's been having an affair with his hot young shop assistant, Sibilla. Partly out of frustration and partly out of desperation, Yambo agrees to return to his family's rural estate, where he spent his World War II-era childhood, in an attempt to regain lost time.
Eco makes many references to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, in which the taste of a madeleine triggers a vast series of detailed memories. By rifling through his old comic books and the physical artifacts of his youth -- many of which are reproduced as illustrations in the novel -- Yambo hopes to bring on a similar flood of recollection.
At this point, about halfway through the you-are-what-you-read story, Eco takes us on a slight detour, and the otherwise compelling novel begins to lose momentum before an unexpected and jolting plot twist gets it back on track. The middle of the novel simply drags on too long. Far too much space is dedicated to detailing the minutia of old comic books and adventure tales, and we lose sight of the storyline -- Yambo's search for identity -- that has so far compelled us to keep reading. The nostalgia eventually becomes distracting even as he starts to recognize the unsettling connection between his supposedly harmless childhood reading and the totalitarian propaganda of Mussolini-era Italy.
Perhaps Eco's point in The Mysterious Flame is that a national identity isn't so different from personal identity, that a country's decisions -- for instance to adopt or reject fascism -- determine its character. In focusing so intently on the ways nostalgia continues to define Yambo and his homeland Eco calls to mind the later work of that other great Italian symbolist Federico Fellini, particularly his 1973 film Amarcord. Both artists understand that identity, personal or national, is often based on poor choices and nostalgia for a not-so-rosy past. But that insight doesn't free us from the awful responsibility to make smarter decisions about who we become next.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Champaign, Ill.
An Italian man's amnesia raises philosophical questions about existentialism in Umberto Eco's engaging novel
By Andrew Ervin
THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA. Umberto Eco. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. Harcourt. Illustrated. 464 pages. $28.
In Umberto Eco's novels, including The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, philosophy usually takes precedence over storytelling. The characters serve as archetypes, convenient vehicles for any number of weighty intellectual concepts, and they frequently look more like caricatures than people. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you want to interact with people, go to Wal-Mart.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana provides further evidence that Eco continues to write some of the most timeless and consistently engaging fiction out there. It's little wonder that his books carry such intellectual weight; he's a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. And while an academic interest in signs, symbols and iconography would weigh down many authors, for Eco the passion serves as a sort of well from which he draws again and again.
Italian sexagenarian Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni wakes up in a hospital to learn that he has a strangely selective form of retrograde amnesia. He can't remember his name or any of the details of life -- his wife, for instance, is totally unrecognizable -- but he can recall just about everything he's ever read. "I saw myself in the mirror. At least I was fairly sure it was me, because mirrors, as everyone knows, reflect what is in front of them. A white, hollow face, a long beard, and two sunken eyes. This is great: I do not know who I am but I find out I am a monster. I would not want to meet me on a deserted road at night. Mr. Hyde."
Eco uses Yambo's condition to raise all sorts of philosophical questions, specifically about the big-e Existentialist notion that being is becoming. Existentialism, you may recall, was the school of thought that reached its zenith in the occupied France of World War II. One idea behind the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and others is that a person's identity, his essence, isn't innate but rather is determined by the choices he makes.
Yambo is a classic Existentialist hero in that he has no essence other than what he is able to recreate for himself using the material possessions around him. He soon returns home to his wife and his rare-books business but his memory has become a pastiche made up of far-flung literary allusions and the swatches of poetry that come to him through the fog of his amnesia.
Despite a close friend's salacious remarks he can't remember if he's been having an affair with his hot young shop assistant, Sibilla. Partly out of frustration and partly out of desperation, Yambo agrees to return to his family's rural estate, where he spent his World War II-era childhood, in an attempt to regain lost time.
Eco makes many references to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, in which the taste of a madeleine triggers a vast series of detailed memories. By rifling through his old comic books and the physical artifacts of his youth -- many of which are reproduced as illustrations in the novel -- Yambo hopes to bring on a similar flood of recollection.
At this point, about halfway through the you-are-what-you-read story, Eco takes us on a slight detour, and the otherwise compelling novel begins to lose momentum before an unexpected and jolting plot twist gets it back on track. The middle of the novel simply drags on too long. Far too much space is dedicated to detailing the minutia of old comic books and adventure tales, and we lose sight of the storyline -- Yambo's search for identity -- that has so far compelled us to keep reading. The nostalgia eventually becomes distracting even as he starts to recognize the unsettling connection between his supposedly harmless childhood reading and the totalitarian propaganda of Mussolini-era Italy.
Perhaps Eco's point in The Mysterious Flame is that a national identity isn't so different from personal identity, that a country's decisions -- for instance to adopt or reject fascism -- determine its character. In focusing so intently on the ways nostalgia continues to define Yambo and his homeland Eco calls to mind the later work of that other great Italian symbolist Federico Fellini, particularly his 1973 film Amarcord. Both artists understand that identity, personal or national, is often based on poor choices and nostalgia for a not-so-rosy past. But that insight doesn't free us from the awful responsibility to make smarter decisions about who we become next.
Andrew Ervin is a writer in Champaign, Ill.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
6/05/2005
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