The premise of Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, may
strike some readers as laughably unpromising, and others as breathtakingly
rich. A sixty-ish Milanese antiquarian bookseller nicknamed Yambo suffers
a stroke and loses his memory of everything but the words he has read: poems,
scenes from novels, miscellaneous quotations. His wife Paola fills in the bare
essentials of his family history, but in order to trigger original memories,
Yambo retreats alone to his ancestral home at Solara, a large country house
with an improbably intact collection of family papers, books, gramophone records,
and photographs. The house is a museum of Yambo's childhood, conventiently empty
of people, except of course for one old family servant with a long memory--an
apt metaphor for the mind. Yambo submerges himself in these artifacts, rereading
almost everything he read as a school boy, blazing a meandering, sometimes
misguided, often enchanting trail of words. Flares of recognition do come, like
"mysterious flames," but these only signal that Yambo remembers something; they
do not return that memory to him. It is like being handed a wrapped package,
the contents of which he can only guess.

Within the limitations of Yambo's handicap and quest, Eco creates wondrous
variety, wringing surprise and delight from such shamelessly hackneyed plot
twists as the discovery of a hidden room. Illustrated with the cartoons,
sheet music covers, and book jackets that Yambo uncovers in his search, The
Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana can be read as a love letter to literature,
a layered excavation of an Italian boyhood of the 1940s, and a sly meditation
on human consciousness.

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