The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, and readers deprived of his university courses in Bologna are never allowed to forget it in his novels.

Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, and readers deprived of his university courses in Bologna are never allowed to forget it in his novels. The plot of his latest concerns an antiquarian book dealer called Yambo who, on recovering from an accident, discovers that he can remember every word of every book he has ever read but nothing about his own life. With his battered recall stirred by an old comic book, this Jason Bourne of the second-hand trade heads back to his childhood home; before long he is deep in the Italian comics, songs and novels of the Fascist years, trying to read the signposts back to himself.

The monologue which forms the bulk of the book struggles to be, all at once, a po-mo detective story, a social and psychological commentary on growing up under Mussolini, and a story of love for someone perpetually unattainable: "a sort of Dante-Beatrice thing". Along the way, of course, Eco makes great play with the thesis that any human consciousness is no more than the sum of its experience. But deprived of backstory or deuteragonist, Yambo has only the reader to talk to, and, despite a late recovery (some good war stories), his pedantic musings can grate.

One could overlook the lumbering semiotic playfulness ("I had thought cellars symbolised the welcome of the mother's womb, with their amniotic dampness"), and the notes-on-self provided by adoring womenfolk ("You're a tireless reader with an iron memory... You have an irresistible smile") if Yambo had sufficient character to give shape to the narrative - or if Eco exercised enough critical focus to limit its excesses. But he never seems to inspect why it should be this book, this form, rather than any other. Perhaps by way of compensation, the text is enlivened with reproductions of the comics under discussion, rather in the manner of lecture handouts.

Eco's last publication in English was the collection On Beauty, which started life as a CD-ROM of pictures linked by brief musings. Queen Loana, confusing, episodic and periodically enlightening of its times, has something of that work's anthologising impulse; but as a novel, frustratingly, it never makes of its parts a satisfactory whole.

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