Spring 2007

Like Yambo, the main character in Umberto Eco’s 5th novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, the reader of this dizzying book might similarly feel lost in a fog- with random sound bytes of meaning (quotes) as their only light to see through the immense fog of literary blather.
“I said to myself: Yambo, your memory is made of paper. Not of Neurons, but of pages. Maybe someday someone will invent an electronic contraption allowing people to travel by computer among all the pages ever written, from the beginning of the world till today, and pass from one to another with the touch of a finger, without knowing any longer where or who they are, and everyone will be like you.” (p.88)
It is worth reading the first 88 pages of the book, if only to find this quote. Yambo wakes up from a coma to find that his memory of his personal history has been erased, and he is left with only his book knowledge, which, as an antiquarian bookseller, is still quite substantial.
“The other songs, too, made it seem as if life were running on two different tracks: on one, the war bulletins; on the other, the endless lessons in optimism and gaiety that our orchestras offered in such abundance.” (p. 201)
To quicken his recovery Yambo goes back to his childhood home (in Solara) to see if this environment will trigger his memory. He ends up lost in a sea of pop-culture paraphernalia from the Italian WWII era. The author devotes a tremendous amount of energy recounting this time in history, but this relentless focus seems almost like an aside.
Yambo recounts:
“Solara had not given me back anything that was truly and uniquely mine. What I had rediscovered were the things I had read, which countless others had also read.” (p.272)
For a time the reader might think that this is where Eco is going with the story. Is our memory ever our own, or is it dictated to us from our culture? What does it mean that a whole generation can hum the theme song of the Simpson’s but doesn't know their great-grandparents names? But the reader would find herself disappointed as Eco twists the plot (plot?) again and then again until Yambo, having recovered his memory, loses his consciousness. Having lost said consciousness Yambo wonders:
“What if Someone is projecting a film directly into my brain? Perhaps I am a brain in some kind of solution, in a culture broth…and someone is sending me stimuli to make me believe that I once had a body, and that others existed around me-when only my brain and the Stimulator exist.” (p.418)
Here the story takes a turn for the worse. Those without a high tolerance for chaos and kitsch would be advised to stop before it's too late. Is Yambo dead? Does he ever see the face of Lila? Who is Mandrake the Magician?
The reader may find that they do not care so much if any of the previous 448 pages have made any coherent sense or not, only that the story is over. Finished. And they smile a sigh of relief as the black sun sets in the sky.