The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I read parts of this (I couldn't read the middle hundred pages) as part of a project to read novels with images. Eco calls this "An Illustrated Novel," partly alluding to the comic books that he remembers from his childhood. I found the book intolerable. 1: The narrator's knowledgeable voiceWell-read and scholarly authors, like Canetti or Richard Powers, tend to be praised by people who think they have endless erudition. I think that's a mistaken way to evaluate an author, because no author I know has that really "peregrine" erudition. Eco is limited, and so was Canetti. ("Peregrine" is a word Leopardi used to describe his own learning, and it fits; in my book, only people like Arnaldo Momigliano are genuinely bewilderingly erudite. Everyone else is obviously mortal.)The problem here, aside from readers' reactions, is that Eco himself hows off continuously, unconsciously, happily, as if he wasn't showing off at all. Here's a typical passage. The main character has woken in a hospital, and he can't remember his name.--"And yet I did have it on the tip of my tongue. After a moment I offered the most obvious reply."My name is Arthur Gordon Pym.""That isn't your name."Of course, Pym was someone else.[Note how coy this is: the name is part of the title of Edgar Allen Poe's only novel. Eco doesn't quite tell us, but alludes to the fact that the name does mean something. He's already done this on the very first page of his book, alluding to Bruges-la-Morte, the most important predecessor of his own book, but not quite telling readers what he's doing. It's a wink and a nod for people in the know.]"Call me... Ishmael?""Your name is not Ishmael. Try harder."[This is supposed to be comedy, because readers are expected to get this allusion.]"A word. Like running into a wall. Saying Euclid or Ishmael was easy... I tried to explain. "It doesn't feel like something solid, it's like walking through a fog.""What's the fog like?" he asked."The fog on the bristling hills climbs drizzling up the sky, and down below the mistral howls and whitens the sea... What's the fog like?"[Again, coy: he's quoting, but this time it isn't at all clear what the source is. It's a puzzle, like on "Mastermind" or NPR.]"You put me at a disadvantage... I'm only a doctor. And besides, this is April, I can't show you any fog. Today's the twenty-fifth of April.""April is the cruelest month."[Another in-joke, which readers will be expected to get. Eco makes sure we know now everyone gets jokes like this:]"I'm not very well-read, but I think that's a quotation." (pp. 6-7)--The book is like this throughout. Eco apparently doesn't think he's boasting, but he is. He also lectures: there are long pages with medical diagnoses, bibliographic citations, historical references, etc. What's intolerable here is that Eco only half-realizes he's showing off. He is also exuberant about all kinds of cultural detritus, and that's great -- it's the semiotician of his early work. I liked pp. 108-110, where he tells us about obscure torture techniques, and then gives us lists of flags, musical instruments, weaponry, heraldry... he has no idea when to stop, which is great. But often what he does is either unconscious boasting, presented as the products of a full imagination, or else professorial lecturing, presented as an interest in the variegated facts of the world.The impetus to appear scholarly overflows the narration, because the book ends with a long list of sources for the illustrations. This list wasn't necessary: it goes beyond what copyright restrictions would require, and so it becomes a sort of scholarly apparatus, as if it was written by the narrator. It's also, in the end, more showing off.All this is just one reason I found the book unreadable. The other reason has to do with the images.2. The imagesThe use of images is ham-fisted, for at least four reasons:(A) The use of color.Eco is lucky -- and nearly unique -- in that his previous sales enabled him to produce this book in full color. It's one of just a few novels with color illustrations, and the fact that they are of good quality means that he can conjure objects of nostalgia differently than, say, Sebald. When Eco's character finds a cocoa tin in an attic, he can show it in full color and detail, and bring it into the present in a way that an author like Sebald couldn't (I don't mean he would have always wanted to, but the option wasn't available). But Eco makes very little use of this; most every object in this book is scanned, at apparently high resolution, and simply presented to us.(B) Reproducing objects without backgrounds.There are a few photos of three-dimensional objects in the book, but they are cropped white all around, as in catalogues. The reason for that decision isn't acknowledged in the book; it makes them look like objects in catalogues. (C) The effect of cropping.All the other hundreds of illustrations are cropped tightly to the edges of the image or cover, or else they're details. Some are arranged in rows and columns (pp. 138, 140), making them look like illustrations in a reference book. These layout and design choices are again odd, and unremarked by the narrator. Why allude to scholarly or reference works? After all, the narrator is rummaging through boxes and piles of papers in an attic -- he isn't supposed to be preparing a book for publication. In fact, Eco was preparing a book for publication, and that fact intrudes on the fiction. (One image is reproduced with its tattered margins, the way Anne Carson does; that makes it seem precious, but that isn't remarked on either.)(D) Image manipulation.The final episode of the book is an hallucination: the narrator imagines himself in a drama with comic book characters. On pp. 422-45, full-page illustrations from comics are matched with facing pages of text. It's the only time in the book where the text isn't full page, because Eco wants to match it to the pictures. From the list of illustrations it's apparent that Eco put these together himself from a number of different comics. They are credited as "montages by the author." But as montages, they're ham-fisted: characters are just pasted together, without even the adjustments that an artist like Erro makes when he does collages of comics. Many of the images have vignetting -- Eco used a blur function in Photoshop or some other application, and it needs to be said -- in the 21st century, when everyone has some photo-editing skills, and in the context of a novel that is all about images -- that he used the blur function very badly. He could have capitalized on this, for example by saying his narrator's mind was blurred in a simple fashion, but he apparently does not think his photo manipulation requires comment. But it does: these images are as awkwardly done as William Gass's graphics in his novel "The Tunnel."I once had a chance to ask Gass about those illustrations. Why, I wanted to know, do the images all look like mid-1980s computer graphics, with thick outlines and primary colors? Because, he said, the narrator inhabits that world. I think that would have been a good answer if the narrator of "The Tunnel" had a computer, with a graphics program, and was producing images as best he could. But there is no such theme in the book. Instead the illustrations in "The Tunnel" appear the way Eco's illustrations do in "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna": as the products of rudimentary digital skills, which appear to their makers as adequate, but which cannot appear that way to anyone who pays as much attention to images as the authors themselves ask readers to do.
L'Eco dei ricordiQuando lessi questo libro una decina di anni fa, mi affidai a una visione panoramica dell’insieme. E mi piacque. Riletto adesso, e aggrappandomi a una visione panoramica dell’insieme, mi piace.Dare lo stesso giudizio a un libro, a distanza di dieci anni, è quasi sconfortante per un lettore medio forte, convinto di evolversi continuamente in una maturità letteraria che va di pari passo con le sue letture. Se non fosse, che in questo caso, riesco a percepire quei dettagli per cui mi aggrappo a una prospettiva globale del romanzo.È infatti uno di quei casi, in cui tocca stilare una media dei pro e dei contro. Partiamo dal fatto che Eco è uno che di letteratura ne sa. E non gioca certo a fare il modesto. Da questo punto di vista, leggere questo libro è come aprire la Treccani alla lettera X. Uno pensa, quante parole vuoi che ci siano a parte xilofono, poi ti accorgi che ci sono 20 pagine di parole icseggianti e non sono tutti nomi propri di paesi /persone orientali, e impallidisci indovinando cosa ci può essere dietro il resto dell’alfabeto. Fate conto sia un kebab farcito di citazioni colte ad uso e consumo di chi vuol prenderne spunto. Riflettere su quante cose ci siano ancora da leggere e imparare, distrae ampiamente dall’Umby smargiasso che vanta cose che voi umani ecc ecc…In secondo luogo, e su questo sarò breve, Eco ha uno spiccato senso della grammatica italiana. Pulitissimo e con un uso della punteggiatura, che rispecchia l’originario senso delle pause, del respiro e dell’espressione che sta dietro la ratio di voler trasporre su carta un qualsiasi discorso orale. Una cosa che per un sedicenne di oggi, ha lo stesso sapore dell’aramaico.In terzo luogo, è un libro autobiografico. Che prende spunto da un escamotage abbastanza banale. Un signore di mezza età che perde la memoria, e scavando nei suoi luoghi d’infanzia, ritrova se stesso (e la memoria se del caso). Quanti libri autobiografici ci siamo pappati, di quante infanzie tra orti soleggiati e casolari abbandonati abbiamo letto? Un numero indefinito. Il tutto sta a propinartelo in modo piacevole. E anche questo Eco lo sa fare. Solo che qua c’è il primo errore. Ha scritto il libro per un target di lettori coetanei. Albumizzare il libro con illustrazioni d’epoca è stato un colpo di genio, solo che la profusione è inversamente proporzionale alla vivacità e all’età del lettore. Mio padre ci sguazzerebbe che è una bellezza, tra incipit di canzoncine ante guerra e illustrazioni vintage di vecchie scatole di caffè. Uno che è nato come me a fine anni 70, all’inizio è curioso, poi si diverte scoprendo che riesce a carpire un quarto (non di più) delle citazioni canterine, dopo incomincia ad annoiarsi e infine assume la faccia di circostanza di un paracarro. Il mio modesto parere, è che Eco questa cosa l’abbia capita perfettamente, e per accalappiarsi un consenso unanime, dal microscopico dei suoi ricordi personali sia voluto passare al macroscopico dei ricordi collettivi, tirando fuori la guerra , la resistenza, il nemico che ci ascolta, cose che per amor di conoscenza continuiamo a leggere sempre, questa volta tutti, non solo gli over 70, con una certa morbosa soddisfazione. Ora, però, sfortunatamente, due anni prima del 2004, data in cui venne edito questo libro, era uscito Il paese dei Mezarat di Dario Fo, che sempre sfortunatamente io lessi poco prima di questo, e al netto delle illustrazioni che nel libro di Fo non ci sono, al netto dei luoghi d’infanzia che sono ovviamente diversi ma uguali nel modo di percepirli, al netto dei nomi dei protagonisti degli aneddoti sulla resistenza, al netto dell’autobiografia di un autore di successo, sembra di rileggere la solita pappa. E con questo non voglio dire che Eco abbia copiato da Fo, ci mancherebbe, ma che una storia come la loro, è abbastanza comune, a parte il successo professionale raggiunto, all’80 per cento degli italiani loro coetanei, e quindi mi acchiappa, in quanto a trama (e il discorso vale sia per Eco, che per Fo) quanto i racconti di mia nonna. Begli aneddoti, ma li posso sentire anche da qualcuno di famiglia. La cosa buona, in conclusione, rimane che però, non siamo fortunatamente tutti uguali. E per chi sa poco del patrimonio storico italiano, della letteratura classica, per chi non ha nonni, e non ha mai fatto collezioni di francobolli, questo libro rappresenta comunque una miniera di spunti notevoli, e leggendolo, ci si potrebbe scoprire a fare la stessa faccia di Bretodeau in Amelie, quando apre la scatola dei ricordi e ritrova il suo tempo perduto. Che come visione panoramica dell’insieme ha in definitiva, qualcosa di affascinante.
What do You think about The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana (2006)?
If you're interested in getting a grasp on how the Fascists, or any political ideology based on repression like any other ideology, had handled public opinion, in an atmosphere of a novel that is completely dazzling because you watch the character being reborn and reliving his childhood through the dust and rummaging in the house of Solara and climbing up and down the gorge and every possible comic book he'd lay hands on. Yambo in this novel is a multidimensional characters who made more of his childhood than if he'd just consider it his childhood, because he recreated decades in couple of days and lived them vividly to the point of overdosing on his "own self". Perhaps the novel seems a lot personal as if it contains whole segments of Eco's childhood, or someone else's childhood around him. The novel might be a good tool to probe colonialist countries in the sense it gives a general idea on how the youth of this country are torn apart, how that colonies might be near and far away at the same time and how children would be forced to die for this duce, whether in the literal sense or just in the sense they'd lose every bit of their childhood under the manipulation of a leader's whims. This being said, everything connected to a period that made the name of my country take shape is an important read on a personal level. Perhaps this novel is strictly for Italian audience, and I therefore indulge myself among this audience, and it is worth it
—Anas Elgaood
Umberto Eco, as usual, delivers a brilliant story through the mind of a man who has lost his memory to amnesia. We are introduced into his world at the same moment he is, left to search for answers to his past and personal character, discovering them alongside him.It was fascinating to read about Italian culture through the war years (something I hadn't really ever seen before) and to see how American culture was viewed through Italian eyes through the years as well.There are so many incredible stories in this narrative and the pictures and graphics throughout let you feel as though you ARE Yambo...The breathless finale, running ever up a staircase was a master stroke.This is a fantastic book, proving once again that Eco is a master of his craft, even translated out of the original language.
—Bryan Young
Eco's warmest and most accessible novel is also maddeningly impenetrable on a certain level. It is a thinly veiled literary autobiography couched as an amnesiac's mystery, but what could have been a fascinating tale of memory and its construction is undercut by a ceaseless nostalgia for cultural artifacts that only Eco himself could fully appreciate. Most readers will not connect with anything that he references until the protagonist explores the 1950s paper trail of his past, and what little he says about the tenor of various times (was this also meant to be some sort of veiled polemic about fascism and the effects upon the psyches of those raised in that environ?) is lost in the endless, almost list-like repetition of this ephemera. The metatextual aspect of the book could be a sly commentary on what it means to be human, suggesting that the modern psyche is nothing more than a compilation of the mediated experiences we suffer so gladly, but here too, the book is a bit of a failure, as the main character simply continues to muddle through his nostalgia without learning much about himself. In the end, we are as immersed in the beloved fog of Yambo as he, and we are no better off for it.
—Ron
