The mysterious flame of Queen Loana

Reviewer Andrew Rutherford
July 16, 2005

The mysterious flame of Queen Loana: an illustrated novel
By Umberto Eco
Secker & Warburg, $55

Ah, the mysterious titles of Umberto Eco. This one, which it shares with a 1940s comic book about a 2000-year-old African queen, goes to the heart of the matter. The genre Mysterious Flame rests on, as detective fiction was to Name of the Rose, as occult speculation was to Foucault's Pendulum, is picture-book pulp, many pages of which illustrate the text.

The set-up - and indeed, it is contrived - is that an antiquarian bookseller, Yambo, finds himself without any fundamental memories (who he is, what he does), but with a largely intact memory of his reading. References to Borges' Funes the Memorious are duly registered. His stream of consciousness before treatment is an allusive Joycean patter, connecting his strange sensations to much more vividly apprehended fragments of literary history. When told his younger, vivacious wife Paola is to visit him, he asks what if he mistakes her for a hat - which might seem droll if you were already in a good mood.

Once our semi-memorious hero goes home, Eco milks the first-time experiences of the ageing savant. Making love is at least as good as the literature on the topic. Defecating outside is good too.

Yambo decides to work with the functioning aspects of his memory, particularly his capacity for visual association, to recover the life he has forgotten. He is especially concerned that he doesn't know what the love he shared with his first wife was like. Conveniently, there is a disused chapel, at the villa where he grew up, where he had accumulated all the detritus of his boyhood.

And so we pass through his enthusiasms, with illustrations. He remembers what every stamp collector knows, how suggestive an image, a sovereign's face, a colour scheme can be (here his collection had an antipodean edge: the Territory of New Guinea, the British Solomons, the Fiji Islands). He also did cigarette tins.

There are the Fascist boys' own papers that manage to exploit some of the same exoticism with their tales of brave Italians in Abyssinia.

Where an adult can't help classifying the visual material by origin (specifically Italian, pan-European, British or American) or style (literary illustration, comic book), and Eco somewhat schematically organises it, there is also something of a sense of the way such distinctions mean less to an emerging sensibility.

Sometimes vagaries of origin are part of the story, and here Mysterious Flame contains some interesting cultural history. The versions of Disney comics the young Yambo collects are usually rip-offs, "pirated", to use the contemporary, disproportionate term.

As comics they could seem too trivial for the Fascist government to censor: Yambo first hears of the possibility of a free press when Mickey Mouse, Topolino as he was in the Italian, starts up his own newspaper. But they could matter. When the US entered the war, Italian readers uniquely watched Mickey Mouse being killed.

Yambo's tastes alter predictably with puberty, when sophistication and sauciness go hand in hand. He begins to state as facts elements of his life. By the end of his study of his own archive, he speaks the language of a composite graphical novel, while the full-page illustrations are Eco's own bright montages and pastiche of an ahistorical hybrid style.

The narrative of Yambo's life turns out to be a whole lot more ordinary than the tales that fascinated him, which is almost invariably the case. He felt Fascism's pull and that of the Church, but also was taken by rough wits of a left-wing bent. The yearnings of a pastel-coloured romantic aren't completely disappointed in human love. This is realistic, but what an edifice to get there.

Mysterious Flame is intelligently framed. You could ring the changes of any theory of memory and identity, or collecting, on it and it would sound; it doesn't seem a compelling artefact, however, to enhance such a theory.

Robert Calasso's translator Geoffrey Brock replaces William Weaver, Eco's usual translator, the man who introduced the Anglosphere to Italo Calvino besides. He seems on top of the problems of allusion and multilingualism the text throws up and his version is attractively light for all that. But the writing is not the tour de force it needs to be to sustain such a schematic structure.
