The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana - Softcover

Eco, Umberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0436205890 ISBN 13: 9780436205897

Publisher: Secker, 2005

Synopsis

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 sideas 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.

About this title

Review:

"Confirms Eco as an outstanding writer of philosophy dressed as fiction" (Stephanie Merrit Observer)

"As always with Eco, there is much to admire" (Sunday Times)

"A beautiful evocation of a difficult period of Italian history, full of the flair and erudition for which we love Eco" (Metro)

"Genuinely clever...the writing, the quotes and the pictures often tickle the brain" (Irish Independent)

"Witty, playful, and incorrigibly erudite, Eco clearly had fun writing this book. There is much to enjoy" (Daily Mail)

From the Publisher:

This remarkable illustrated novel is Eco's most accessible and bestselling book since The Name of the Rose.

About this edition

• Publisher: Secker
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0436205890
• ISBN 13: 9780436205897
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464