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The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco
Eco's latest novel concerns Yambo, a 60-something amnesiac book dealer in Milan who retreats to his childhood home to pour over memorabilia in an attempt to find his lost memories.
Harcourt, 480 pages
06/03/2005
$27.00
ISBN: 0151011400
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
NOTES:
Translated into English by Geoffrey Brock.
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Brad Hooper
The novel's literal level almost sports the pacing of a thriller as Yambo pieces his past together, and on a more metaphysical level, it addresses provocative and never outdated or irrelevant questions about the integrity of one's identity and the irresistible attempt to estimate, while still a part of the community of the living, one's lasting imprint on the global slate. [1 Mar 2005, p.1102]
Kirkus Reviews
A head-spinning tour through the corridors of history and popular culture, and one of this sly entertainer's liveliest yet.
Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
The many rich and specific details must have special resonance for Italians, but American readers won't feel daunted; the entertaining narrative fairly rips by. Another winner from Eco. [1 Apr 2005, p.85]
Publishers Weekly
The result has a somewhat academic feel, but it's an absorbing exploration of how that most fundamental master-narrative, our memory, is pieced together from a bricolage of pop culture.
The Observer Stephanie Merritt
What begins with the most advanced science of the mind ends with deliberate echoes of Calderón de la Barca's questions about dreams and reality, and confirms Eco as an outstanding writer of philosophy dressed as fiction.
The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps
Flame's long middle section is little more than a catalog of childhood obsessions filled out with illustrations of everything from sheet music to Flash Gordon strips. But for the author of The Name Of The Rose, they're texts rich with cultural significance for the generation that came of age under Mussolini.
The Spectator Alberto Manguel
Every reader, Eco seems to say, invents, up to a certain point, not only the books he reads but also his own character, and different readers, using identical material, will construct other characters, other memories of the same reading, other associations, other Queen Loanas.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Paul Duguid
Eco's layered irony may attract intellectual admiration, but it suggests a contempt for those who buy his books and is hard to like. His writing, like Bodoni's memory, remains cerebral, not visceral.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is impressive in the sheer breadth of knowledge intertwined to form a national consciousness, and the tale it tells is engaging, but it could have had even more resonance if its protagonist had been less self-absorbed.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Just when you've decided the book is a beautiful, pointless trip down someone else's memory lane, Eco throws in a sad love story and a haunting World War II adventure, and you realize that the strange journey was well worth taking after all.
Washington Post Justin Cronin
It's faint praise, perhaps, to say that a novel is worth the trouble, but that's the sort of book Eco has written here. Too long by half, it nevertheless rewards the patient reader with a tale that's both intellectually provoking and, in the end, emotionally serious.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Gilbert Reid
Eco's book is not only a novel -- and not only a cultural history -- it's also a how-to book: "how to discover one's true self by digging in the attic of one's mind."
The Guardian Ian Sansom
The book is essentially and specifically a profound meditation on the nature of memory and forgetting - but fortunately it also has a story, upon which and through which Eco's great procession makes its long, meandering way.
The Independent Tim Martin
As a novel, frustratingly, it never makes of its parts a satisfactory whole.
Boston Globe Amanda Heller
Despite the Hollywood allusions and enough Pop Art-work to stock a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, much that is primal and essential in this Jungian odyssey gets lost in translation.
Daily Telegraph Phil Baker
Eco's novel is an interesting discussion of the way even our deepest selves are a montage, made up from scraps of literature and half-forgotten fantasies from half-understood pictures, but it's a self-indulgent and heavy-handed treatment of the subject, and it feels about four times too long.
Houston Chronicle Michael Hardy
Eco writes movingly about the subject, drawing upon an enviable arsenal of literature, but the principle lesson this reader took from the book was that plowing the fields of Mnemosyne can be hazardous to your health. Eco should have heeded his own warning.
Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
In the first part, Eco set out a small fictional feast for us. Here, he has left the table to perform semiotic calisthenics. They go on so wearily as to arouse the suspicion that, far from declaring belief in them, he is demonstrating their exhaustion through reiterative overload. How can the text rule if nobody wants to read it? [5 June 2005, p.R9]
San Francisco Chronicle Tamara Straus
Yambo, stuffed with Augustine and Poe and constantly spouting literary quotations about fog (the primary metaphor for his amnesia), remains an annoying pedant for most of the novel's 400-plus pages.
Slate Robert Alter
In Queen Loana, the protagonist is little more than the scaffolding for a set of ideas that turn out to be rather tired ones. Eco's subject is certainly compelling, but it may require a different kind of novelist to realize it adequately.
Sydney Morning Herald Simon Hughes
Since Eco is a professor of semiotics he should read the signs. The experience of life is more than the sum of its surfaces and, on that score, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is an extended wank.
Wall Street Journal Matt Murray
While engaging, though, the book ultimately isn't very satisfying. Yambo is perfectly pleasant but not especially interesting, a problem since most of the action occurs inside his head. By the end, it's hard to escape the sense that all this cultural evocation and probing is a sort of semiotic game without much meaning.
The New York Times Book Review Thomas Mallon
This is not so much a novel as a discursive reconstruction of what one surmises to have been the author's early reading life.
 The average user rating for this book is 8.8 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
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