Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco (2006, Paperback, Reprint)

Umberto Eco's novel, "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" reads like a psalm of praise to pulps and literature. Through the use of illustrations and graphics, Eco indulges his passion for pulp materials by reproducing such objects as movie posters, song lyrics and a graphic novella rendering the Book of Revelation as a Flash Gordon melodrama, with intriguing asides on cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind thrown in. The book has an academic feel, but it provides an absorbing exploration of how that most fundamental narrative, our memory, is pieced together from the quilt patches of pop culture.

Yambo, the protagonist, is a Milanese antiquarian bookseller who suffers a stroke and loses his memory of everything, except the words which he has read- poems, scenes from novels, and a host of quotations. After his wife, Paola, fills in the gaps of his familial history, Yambo retreats to his ancestral home at Solara in an attempt to piece it all together. Within the large country house, he discovers a treasure of family papers, books, gramophone records, and photographs. An old family servant serves as guide for his thoughts as he absorbs the collection of comic books, schoolbooks, Fascist propaganda, popular music, romantic novels and poetry he had written about an unattainable high school beauty. Flares of recognition ignite, like "mysterious flames," but these only signal that Yambo remembers some things, not the thing.

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is a playful and reverent novel, wringing surprise and delight from such plot twists as the discovery of a hidden room. The novel is an engaging and clever meditation on human consciousness. The story arc of "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" may strike some readers as laughably unpromising, but the result is surprisingly rich. If you love literature, history, and graphics, you'll enjoy this book.

I really enjoyed this book, and also found it unsettling.
I think this is on purpose.

This in-depth first person study of a man who has lost his memory
said a lot to me about the nature of the self, the search for deeper meaning
in our lives, and how we grow from childhood into adulthood.
It's like a mystery novel of a man trying to find his missing self.

Searching through the home of his childhood for clues means revisiting
his formative years - in Italy during the second World War. The small-town
wartime tales and comic books, school essays and family photos, slowly
start to rebuild the character's life as it was.

The book is illustrated with clues that begin to form a portrait of a life-
stamps from Fiji, comic book pages, and Italian magazine ads. I thought it was a fun way to see what the character saw throughout his mental journey.

i believe this book was written with a good premise in mind, but the plot is so underdeveloped. the amazing thing is the length of the novel. eco goes on and on about memories that never coalesce into something significant. he rambles on and on about old novels and comic books that most contemporary readers have no concern for, and even if they did, he says extracts nothing profound or interesting from these old books. this is a pure waste of literature.