The Dying Flame

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is Umberto Eco's sixteenth book and fifth novel. Some of these books, like The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, have become virtual icons of a kind of high-concept literature that first gained wide attention with Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. While often set in a quasi-historical past, in medieval Europe for example, the tales' twists and turns really take place internally, as intellectual mysteries are gradually unspooled (or made more convoluted) in hunts through the labyrinthine corridors of the frontal lobe. People read Eco to experience something akin to the effect of an optical illusion, complicated wordplay (Eco's full-time job is as a professor of Semiotics), or a wicked drug trip. The best name I've heard for it is a mindfuck.

All the ingredients remain in the new novel, except that the book is located in 1991. The narrator, Yambo Bodoni, an antiquarian book dealer in Milan, has just emerged from a coma into good health except for a perplexing case of partial amnesia. While he can remember thousands of poems and world events, he can't remember his children, wife or his own name. Anything factual he's retained; anything personal is lost.

What commences is Yambo's laborious search for his past, his attempt to disperse what he calls the fog over his memory. Now, if the premise of the book already seems overly contrived to you, you will not care for what follows. From page one, Eco makes only half-hearted attempts to clothe his artifices in realism. Yambo's recuperation (the nature of his accident is not explained) seems to involve nothing beyond watching his diet. His family appears not to mind that he doesn't remember who they are; indeed, the clinical nonchalance with which his wife treats his condition becomes downright sinister. She doesn't shed a tear.

Yambo's method of trying to remember himself requires even more suspension of disbelief. It might seem natural for a man in his state to immerse himself in family and friends. Instead, the remainder of the novel takes place in the attic of Yambo's childhood home, where he confines himself and tries to reread everything he ever touched from boyhood to maturity. What we get is a kind of compendium of juvenilia, wearyingly endless titles of childhood literature and descriptions of comic books, 45-rpm records and Italian war propaganda meant to recreate a bygone time for Yambo and Eco's readers.

"My memory is made of paper," Yambo says at the outset and later goes on to muse, "It was undeniable that in Solara [his childhood town] every word gave rise to another. Would I be able to climb back up that chain to the final word? What would it be? 'I'?" In Eco's arid fictional landscape, full of nudge-nudge-wink-wink references to Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and the like, human beings are nothing but: words! Random aggregations of words linking past to present. Words, words, words. Feelings? No, no feelings-there's no intellectual capital in it.

But even if you can swallow these gimmicks in the hopes of a mind-bending payoff, The Mysterious Flame will not satisfy. There's little dense or brainy at all in most of Yambo's anecdotal regressions, which include a clumsy war episode and lots of obsessing over his search for the ideal woman. (Hint: She might have something to do with a character in one of those young-adult books.) The only really fine aspect of this book is the illustrations within it. Perhaps inspired by the current renaissance of the graphic novel, Eco shrewdly shows us the pictures that Yambo describes, crisp beautiful images of the covers of old pulp novels, 50s cigarette ads, picture postcards and comic book blurbs. Ironically, these pictures throw Eco's writing into unkind relief: Their beauty comes from their wonderfully unabashed kitschiness, their lurid colors, prurient characters and brazen melodrama. It's obvious why Yambo is drawn to his old memorabilia. It's not clear why Eco would, in contrast, content himself with boring, static prose.

The mysterious flame of the title is the sensation that Yambo feels when a book or image connects him to something potentially significant in his past. The progression of the novel sets us up for a climactic discovery, a powerful emotional breakthrough that will tie together the prior dawdling strands of ideas. But it never comes. And lacking any good intellectual stimulation, the flame stays a disappointingly dim heat to the end.