''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'' (original Italian title: ''La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana'') is a

novel A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ...

by the

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

writer

Umberto Eco Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian Medieval studies, medievalist, philosopher, Semiotics, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular ...

. It was first published in Italian in 2004, and an

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

translation by Geoffrey Brock was published in spring 2005. The title is taken from the title of an Italian edition album of an episode of the American

comic strip A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...

'' Tim Tyler's Luck''.

Plot

The plot of the book concerns Yambo (full name: Giambattista Bodoni, just like the typographer Giambattista Bodoni), a 59-year-old

Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...

ese antiquarian book dealer who loses his

episodic memory Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred ...

due to a stroke. At the beginning of the novel, he can remember everything he has ever read but does not remember his family, his past, or even his own name. Yambo decides to go to Solara, his childhood home, parts of which he has abandoned following a family tragedy, to see if he can rediscover his lost past. After days of searching through old newspapers,

vinyl Vinyl may refer to: Chemistry * Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a particular vinyl polymer * Vinyl cation, a type of carbocation * Vinyl group, a broad class of organic molecules in chemistry * Vinyl polymer, a group of polymers derived from vinyl ...

records, books, magazines and childhood

comic book A comic book, comic-magazine, or simply comic is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panel (comics), panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by descriptive prose and wri ...

s, he is unsuccessful in regaining memories, though he relives the story of his generation and the society in which his dead parents and grandfather lived. Ready to abandon his quest, he discovers a copy of the original

First Folio ''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'' is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is cons ...

of 1623 among his grandfather's books, the shock of which causes another incident, during which he relives his lost memories of childhood. The final section of the book is, therefore, a literary exploration of the traditional phenomenon whereby a person's life flashes before him or her, as Yambo struggles to regain the one memory he seeks above all others: the face of the girl he loved ever since he was a student. Umberto Eco includes myriad references to both scholarly and popular culture in the book (notably the ''

Flash Gordon Flash Gordon is the protagonist of a space adventure comic strip created and originally drawn by Alex Raymond. First published January 7, 1934, the strip was inspired by, and created to compete with, the already established ''Buck Rogers'' ...

'' strips) and has drawn heavily on his own experiences growing up in

Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 un ...

Fascist Italy Fascist Italy () is a term which is used in historiography to describe the Kingdom of Italy between 1922 and 1943, when Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship. Th ...

. Like other Eco novels, ''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'' boasts abundant

intertextuality Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, Gerard Genette (1997) ''Paratexts'p.18/ref ...

Critical reception

The novel received generally positive reviews. On ''

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

'', which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 0–100 reviews from professional reviewers, the book achieved a rating score of 65 based on 23 reviews.

References

External links

*
Harcourt Books interview with Umberto Eco

June 20 2005 Diane Rehm interviews Eco
(audio)
Umberto Eco Wiki: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
- wiki annotation of Queen Loana. Contains hundreds of entries. {{DEFAULTSORT:Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The 2004 Italian novels Bompiani books Novels by Umberto Eco Novels set in Milan Postmodern novels