Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana



My second audio-book ever was Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana", which I finished listening to last weekend. I might be more of a fan of Eco's essays than his literature at this point, as "the mysterious flame..." was interesting but compelling only in tiny spurts.

The story is a meditation on the constructed nature of memory, which most succeeded when it abandoned the trappings and conventions of literature and spoke in a philosophical/academic voice.

The premise is that an antiquarian book dealer gets a kind of amnesia -- he recalls all the book knowledge he's accumulated over the years, but none of the personal/emotional -- and he must figure out who he is and how he came to be.

The bulk of the novel takes place in his childhood home, as Yambo tries to recreate some important sequences to piece together his biography.

While fascinating conceptually, the story is a bit much to take in total. How crazy would you be if you thought that every single point in your life was significant? If experiences were taken individually as opposed to some sort of process (or even minus the ability to accurately group experiences)? It's not how most of us look upon our lives.

Eco clearly had some fun working in pulp and pop-culture artifacts (like comic books, radio shows, etcetera) into his story.


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My Umberto Eco "credentials" (since 1999): I have read "Foucault's Pendulum", "Travels in Hyperreality", "The Name of the Rose", "The Island of the Day Before", and listened to the bulk of "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana". My least favorite was "The Island of the Day Before" (too meta for me, if you can imagine that!), while my favorites remain "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum". His essays are quite good as well.

Posted: Tue - February 7, 2006 at 09:00 PM      

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