Category: FICTION
Guide Created By: Traude & Ginny
Discussion Leader(s): Traude & Ginny
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Guide Description

Plot Synopsis

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is an illustrated novel, Umberto Eco’s fifth since the publication of The Name of the Rose in 1980. The protagonist, Giambattista “Yambo” Bodoni, a 59 year-old antiquarian book dealer, wakes up in a Milan hospital after an unspecified “incident” without recollection of his identity, his past and his relationships. His wife encourages him to return to his grandparents’ home in the countryside where Yambo had spent the war years. There, in the dusty attic of the family villa, watched over by the old family housekeeper, Ada, who shares some of her memories, he begins his own Proustian search for his past. He wades into a sea of memorabilia: stacks of decades-old newspapers collected by the grandfather; comic books; adventure stories; notebooks; photographs; 78 records; his grandfather’s books; his mother’s missal. He has brief flashes of recognition from his childhood and school years through images, sounds, smells, but no clear vision - until a former class mate fills in the gaps, which brings on the incident.

Yambo’s desperate efforts to retrieve his past are recorded in Part 2, the weightiest section of the book. The first-person narrative has elements of the picaresque; the detective story; dream visions; aspects of the bildungsroman, and contains an orgiastic profusion of historical data, philosophical speculations and literary allusions from Dante to Eliot, from D’Annunzio to Dickens, from Pascoli and Pirandello to Shakespeare, in a breath-taking display of Eco’s legendary wit and erudition and a deft combination of scholarly reflection with the popular culture between 1931 to 1944. Yambo’s coming of age coincides with the rise of Fascism and World War II, and the Gragnola episode is compelling, revelatory and moving, particularly for contemporary Italian readers who may know little about Italy’s participation in WW II and the role of the Partisans. Yambo regains full consciousness of his identity only in the totally unforeseeable, fantastic ending in Part 3.

The discovery of a precious first folio of Shakespeare’s works causes a second medical incident. Now fully aware of his past Yambo sees before him the staircase of his old school and descending toward him all the personages of literature and comic books in a splendid procession reminiscent of the rousing finale of a television spectacular. With mounting excitement Yambo waits for the appearance of Lila Saba, his first love at sixteen, who will be the crowning glory of the event, but just as he is about to glimpse her beloved face that had eluded him, the sun turns dark.

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