''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'' (original Italian title: ''La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana'') is a

novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...

by the Italian writer Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 2004, and an

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

translation by

Geoffrey Brock Geoffrey Brock (born October 19, 1964) is an American poet and translator. Since 2006 he has taught creative writing and literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. Biography Brock is the ...

was published in spring 2005. The title is taken from the title of an Italian edition album of an episode of the American

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

Tim Tyler's Luck ''Tim Tyler's Luck'' is an adventure comic strip created by Lyman Young, elder brother of '' Blondie'' creator Chic Young. Distributed by King Features Syndicate, the strip ran from August 13, 1928, until August 24, 1996. Characters and story ...

''.

Plot

The plot of the book concerns Yambo (full name: Giambattista Bodoni, just like the typographer

Giambattista Bodoni Giambattista Bodoni (, ; 16 February 1740 – 30 November 1813) was an Italian typographer, type-designer, compositor, printer, and publisher in Parma. He first took the type-designs of Pierre Simon Fournier as his exemplars, but afterwards bec ...

), a 59-year-old

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

ese antiquarian book dealer who loses his

episodic memory Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred ...

due to a stroke. At the beginning of the novel, he can remember everything he has ever read but does not remember his family, his past, or even his own name. Yambo decides to go to Solara, his childhood home, parts of which he has abandoned following a family tragedy, to see if he can rediscover his lost past. After days of searching through old newspapers, vinyl records, books, magazines and childhood

comic book A comic book, also called comicbook, comic magazine or (in the United Kingdom and Ireland) simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are of ...

s, he is unsuccessful in regaining memories, though he relives the story of his generation and the society in which his dead parents and grandfather lived. Ready to abandon his quest, he discovers a copy of the original First Folio of 1623 among his grandfather's books, the shock of which causes another incident, during which he relives his lost memories of childhood. The final section of the book is, therefore, a literary exploration of the traditional phenomenon whereby a person's life flashes before him or her, as Yambo struggles to regain the one memory he seeks above all others: the face of the girl he loved ever since he was a student. Umberto Eco includes myriad references to both scholarly and popular culture in the book (notably the ''

Flash Gordon Flash Gordon is the protagonist of a space adventure comic strip created and originally drawn by Alex Raymond. First published January 7, 1934, the strip was inspired by, and created to compete with, the already established ''Buck Rogers'' adve ...

'' strips) and has drawn heavily on his own experiences growing up in

Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...

Fascist Italy Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the ...

. Like other Eco novels, ''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'' boasts abundant intertextuality.

Critical reception

The novel received generally positive reviews. On ''

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

'', which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 0–100 reviews from professional reviewers, the book achieved a rating score of 65 based on 23 reviews.

References

External links

*
Harcourt Books interview with Umberto Eco

June 20 2005 Diane Rehm interviews Eco
(audio)
Umberto Eco Wiki: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
- wiki annotation of Queen Loana. Contains hundreds of entries. 2004 Italian novels Bompiani books Novels by Umberto Eco Novels set in Milan Postmodern novels {{2000s-hist-novel-stub