Novel Probes Postmodern Predicament Via Protagonist’s Selective Amnesia

“Remembering is a labor, not a luxury,” Umberto Eco admonishes us.

Consider yourself warned. Giambattista Bodoni, the unfortunate mouthpiece through which Eco delivers his latest novel, “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” will spare you little effort.

Like his first and most popular work of fiction, “The Name of the Rose,” Eco’s new book presents itself as a kind of detective story. But here the author, whose nonfiction work centers on semiotics, seems to care less about providing coherent clues than about dazzling us with the sheer variety of his mind’s palette.

No one could dispute that the result is formidably learned. Eco’s knowledge is vast, and, under only the vaguest pretenses of narrative, “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” lets him broach subjects ranging from Dante’s Inferno to Dick Tracy comics.

Yet, however brilliant and entertaining Eco’s theoretical texts may be, one wonders why he didn’t just take a cue from Harold Bloom and hand us an annotated summer reading list. After all, a novel that cites Melville, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Eliot, and others in its opening pages alone can hardly help but make us think, a little wistfully, of how else we might have spent our time.

The story begins when Bodoni, a “sixtyish” antiquarian book-dealer whose name Eco appears to have taken from the eighteenth-century typographer, awakes from a coma with no memory of his former life or identity. Through some loophole in the threads of fate, however, he knows all of Western literature and a good deal of history and popular psychology par coeur.

Who is he, the good doctor asks.

“Arthur Gordon Pym?” Bodoni suggests. “Call me…Ishamael?”

“Try harder,” the doctor entreats him. (One wishes, in such moments, that a similarly demanding editor had hovered over the writing desk.)

Despite his confusion, Bodoni, nicknamed “Yambo,” is soon discharged from the hospital. He returns home with his wife Paola, with whom he has had several children and, apparently, led a happy life, despite the occasional extramarital dalliance.

(Yambo describes the mechanisms he quickly develops to distinguish former mistresses from the other total strangers who greet him in the streets. Although he first describes Paola as beautiful despite her years, this seems to have little hold over Yambo’s attention; he quickly becomes preoccupied with finding out whether he has had an affair with the pretty Eastern European who assists him in his office.)

However, after a short time in the city, despite his fondness for these relatively innocuous diversions, Yambo accepts his wife’s suggestion that he return to his childhood home in Solara to try to recapture his lost youth.

Here the book more or less abandons its plot—and Eco sends Yambo off to delve into the hoards of books, magazines, and other artifacts that, aided and abetted by the Italian cuisine that rockets his blood pressure to dire levels, are supposedly to help him re-find himself.

It turns out that Yambo has lost only what is called his episodic memory—the form of memory that “establishes a link between who we are today and who we have been”—while his semantic memory of impersonal events and information remains intact.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Yambo says. “I can’t seem to say anything that comes from the heart. I don’t have feelings, I only have memorable sayings.”

Over several weeks, he attempts to ameliorate his plight by obsessive reading and rereading—reproducing various images for his readers as if these sufficed to make the web of allusions hanging in his past alive for us, too.

“Yambo,” he tells himself, “your memory is made of paper. Not of neurons, but of pages.”

We do not doubt it. The novel offers an interesting allegory of the twentieth-century reader defamiliarized from his culture, attempting to reassemble his history and life.

The question is whether this cry can attain the pathos at which it aims, particularly given what it says about the one who cries it. The novel’s characters are not real characters but a mad archivist’s pastiche; and while this is the book’s greatest weakness, it is also a crucial part of its philosophical ambitions.

Eco has taken it upon himself to dramatize texts’ suggestions about the postmodern subject who has absorbed high and low—Vergil, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, comic books, and Fascist propaganda—all in one breath. The question is how much we can care about a protagonist who, in the course of 450 pages, does little but indulge in his ruminations.

This is less an “open work”—or opera aperta, to use a phrase Eco has embraced in his academic work—than a loose ended and formless one. Its diversions do offer small delights. (I was tickled to recognize a Marlene Dietrich song Eco had planted in the text. He replaced the lyrics with Latin, and it actually fits the tune: “duae umbrae nobis una facta sunt, infra laternam stabimus, olim lil marleen, olim lili marleen.”)

But this cannot, ultimately, sustain a novel. It unravels in the final section in a way that creates less mystery than confusion—and, frankly, boredom.

Ronald Knox, the celebrated British mystery writer and author of the “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” (1929) concluded those commandments with the following: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.”

It is safe to assume, given the scope of his learning, that Eco had Knox’s precepts in mind when he composed this novel. I just am not sure that he duly prepped us to be invested in a character who does little but meander through Eco’s own favorites.

—Staff writer Moira G. Weigel can be reached at weigel@fas.harvard.edu.