'Loana' tailored for bibliophiles

Geoffrey Bateman, Special to the News

Friday, June 24, 2005

Reading an Umberto Eco novel is like winding through a maze - quite literally at times, as those familiar with The Name of the Rose and the archival labyrinth at the center of that medieval mystery will recall.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana meanders in a similar way, but this time, Eco guides us through the aging narrator's lost memory - a hazy legacy of the many books that Yambo, a rare-book dealer in his 60s, has read throughout his life and the circumstances in which he read them.

The novel opens as Yambo awakens from the fog of an inexplicable coma, his memory as diffuse as the wispy tendrils of the milky gray that has saturated his consciousness.

Ironically, he can't recall his name or that of his wife, daughters and close friends. Almost his entire memory has been wiped clean but, strangely, he randomly recalls lines from his lifetime of reading. As he says to Paola, his wife, after returning home and trying to reacquaint himself with his life's daily routines, "You'll have to forgive me. I can't seem to say anything that comes from the heart. I don't have feelings, I only have memorable sayings."

As intriguing as the opening scenes of this novel are, Yambo's story borders on the antiseptic at times. True, he is a charming rogue, vitally alive, at least in the realm of romantic intrigue, but much of the novel lacks an emotional center and becomes a pastiche of a highly individualized postmodern literary history.

For Yambo soon quits the flat that he shares with his wife and returns to his family's country home, a place that Paola says he has avoided for much of his adult life. There, Yambo hopes to uncover his forgotten life by sifting through the numerous texts - including encyclopedias, prayer books, children's stories, magazines, novels and record covers - that constituted his early life.

Digging through box after box, he succeeds in part in tracing the faint contours of his childhood and adolescence, but only by becoming familiar with these texts without remembering his first encounter with them.

As we advance through this somewhat unwieldy section, one of the unexpected pleasures that we glean is a survey of some truly wonderful images from Italian popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Eco has obviously labored over these selected illustrations with affection, each one adding a rich layer of texture to the words and images that shaped his narrator's early life.

Despite the often scholastic feel to this part of the novel, it seductively invokes a sense of nostalgia for a book's material presence. What bibliophile can't reflect on a similar experience like that of Yambo's rediscovery of a 1905 encyclopedia and his childhood fascination with definitions?

As Yambo realizes after thumbing through the volume's worn pages, "This had been the first encyclopedia in my life, and I must have pored over it at great length . . . This volume had been used nearly to death, read and reread and creased, and many pages were now coming loose."

Lingering over this book, almost caressing its tattered pages, Yambo affectionately gestures to the powerful way that we construct ourselves out of language and the texts that we encounter in our younger years.

For Yambo, such texts, like that which inspired the novel's title - The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - represent far more than one particular moment, but rather gestures to grander impulses in our lives:

"You read any old story as a child, and you cultivate it in your memory, transform it, exalt it, sometimes elevating the blandest thing to the status of myth. In effect, what seemed to have fertilized my slumbering memory was not the story itself, but the title. The expression the mysterious flame had bewitched me . . . I had spent all the years of my childhood - perhaps even more - cultivating not an image but a sound. Having forgotten the 'historical' Loana, I had continued to pursue the oral aura of other mysterious flames. And years later, my memory in shambles, I had reactivated the flame's name to signal the reverberation of forgotten delights."

It is this reverberation, an actual if ephemeral physical sensation that he experiences throughout his quest to reclaim himself from his own familial archives, that mysteriously resonates whenever Yambo stumbles across a particularly meaningful artifact from his past.

And the novel gains momentum near the end, when Yambo reconnects to two of the most important experiences of his adolescent life - his first passionate, if unrequited, love and a heroic youthful defiance of Italy's fascism. Yet as riveting as these episodes are, they fail to liven up a story too inclined toward abstraction.

For readers who enjoy a bit of literary theory, Eco's work can be delightful. But for everyone else, this novel threatens to languish in the fog from which Yambo struggles so incessantly - and unsuccessfully - to escape.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches literature and writing at the University of Colorado.