The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana - Tapa dura

"The entertaining narrative fairly rips by. Another winner from Eco." "An insidiously witty and provocative story" -- Richard Eder "Los Angeles Times" (06/05/2005) "An insidiously witty and provocative story" "Deeply cerebral, yet remarkably accessible...Eco delights his fans with an intellectual''s take on nostalgia.." "A head-spinning tour through the corridors of history and popular culture, and one of this sly entertainer''s liveliest yet." "An insidiously witty and provocative story"--Richard Eder"Los Angeles Times" (06/05/2005) PRAISE FOR THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA "An insidiously witty and provocative story."--"Los Angeles Times" "Brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated . . . As we accompany Yambo on his trail of self-discovery, we see Umberto Eco, one of the great minds of our era, reveal a little of his heart."--"Chicago Sun-Times" PRAISE FOR THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA "An insidiously witty and provocative story."--"Los Angeles Times" "Brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated . . . As we accompany Yambo on his trail of self-discovery, we see Umberto Eco, one of the great minds of our era, reveal a little of his heart."--"Chicago Sun-Times"

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood.

His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.

But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school and morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image - the schoolgirl he never forgot.

Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves and other printed ephemera, The Mysterious Flame is a fascinating and hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.

(2004-07-02)