The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I recently finished reading The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel by Umberto Eco. I’m not entirely sure what I think of it. I certainly enjoyed Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. The latter particularly since having recently read Dava Sobell’s book on Longitude, the descriptions of early attempts to determine longitude were especially salient. What made “Queen Loana” poignant is that it’s not terribly long since my father died of a cerebral infarction after suffering two strokes (spaced sufficiently far apart that we felt that he was pretty much recovered from the first when the second struck), so Yambo’s ‘incident’ had a relevance to me that it may lack for other readers.

The general structure of the novel is of three parts (or two and a coda); in the first Yambo wakes up after his ‘incident’ to find that his personal narrative memory is completely unavailable to him. (In my father’s case it was — as is perhaps more common — speech that was affected, a loss that was especially hard for a man so talkative). Yambo returns to Solara, his childhood home to attempt to recover his past, and here the book is somewhat amorphous, almost tedious in it’s ploughing-over of Italian comic books of the 1940’s, but you need to read it to give context for what follows. At the end of this section Yambo makes a discovery that throws him into a new state in which he can remember almost everything, and the book attains a new momentum with affecting descriptions of life Italy during the second world war.

The ending comes as a surprise, perhaps a disappointment, but then, in life there are no happy endings; the best one can hope for is a happy middle, so Eco — who is getting on a bit by now and must inevitably be aware of his own approaching end — is entitled to write about death without giving it a romantic gloss.

There are two things that make me uncertain about this book. I'm not convinced that the last part doesn’t to some extent give that romantic gloss to dying; is it there but weighted with Catholic guilt so that it must end that way while leaving open the possibility that had Yambo behaved differently (leaving aside the excesses during his visit to Solara) the end would have been different? I'm also not convinced about the "Illustrated Novel" aspect; there are so many illustrations that they are often distracting. Some of them do convey a specific image relevant to the plot, but I do rather wonder whether most of them are there simply because Eco likes them (the images are credited at the end and many of them are "from the collection of the author").

Do I recommend it (to my own non-existent readership)? A qualified yes. Eco does whatever he does very well, and this is no exception, even if I cannot say that it was fun.

(Added much later) According to the latest Amazon terms and conditions, I have to say that I am “a participant in the Amazon Europe S.à r.l. Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk/Javari.co.uk/Amazon.de/Amazon.fr/Javari.fr/Amazon.it”