The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

by Umberto Eco (Author)

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 tecognize 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.

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Quantity

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 464
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Secker
Published: 06 Jun 2005

ISBN 10: 0436205637
ISBN 13: 9780436205637
Book Overview: This remarkable illustrated novel is set to become Eco's most accessible and bestselling book since THE NAME OF THE ROSE.

Media Reviews
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
Author Bio
Umberto Eco is the author of four bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before and, most recently, Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays. He is also the author of On Beauty. A Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Umberto Eco lives in Italy.