Rebuilding memory, totally

THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA

By Umberto Eco

Harcourt, $27, 469 pages

At the opening of Umberto Eco’s clever new novel, “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” Yambo, the main character and the only one that matters in the whole book at all, is unconscious. He’s had a stroke — he’s 59, bordering very close on 60 — and is under a doctor’s careful care. He’s coming to, slowly, and it’s clear that he’s physically little impaired, but that he has totally lost his memory. All of it.

Oh he can remember intertresting facts about the Emperor Napoleon and Josephine and things he’s learned from the many books he’s read, and he can cite them. But of the kind of memory that counts and means something he has none. He doesn’t recall his own name or what his occupation might have been. He doesn’t know if he ever married or if he might have been “religious,” or what kind of childhood he had.

Yambo is a nickname, he soon learns. His real name, he’s told, is Giambattista Boldoni and what he does for a living is deal in old books. And he is a married man, though he has no recall of his wife or how they met, even though she’s right there, by his bedside. When he is shown an old photograph of his parents on their wedding day, he has a deep reaction. He doesn’t know who the happy couple are, but he knows they have played a significant role in his life.

Hopeful that a recovery is possible, Yambo’s doctor sends his patient back to his home town to experience in detail what his life had been. His job is to immerse himself in the comic books, early encyclopedias and school textbooks, and all those things that made him what he is, gave him his ideas of right and wrong, and provided the images that have guided his life.

All this provides splendid material for Mr. Eco, who loves to play with elusive notions of time and reality, and to debate what we humans might and might not be. Umberto Eco first appeared as a major contender on the public scene in the early1980s with his first book of fiction, “The Name of the Rose.” It was an unlikely bestseller, a medieval murder mystery packed with seriously abstruse data and a lot of sentences in Latin far beyond what most readers were capable of translating. But it did sell well — nearly 20 million copies to date — though one wonders if many copies remained on the shelf unread.

No doubt what attracted readers was the author’s unrelenting intellectual fireworks — Mr. Eco loves word games, and has a need for appearing to be in total control and on top of his material, whatever he’s writing about. An accomplished medievalist and a scholar familiar with philosophy — Mr. Eco did his dissertation on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas — he never grows weary of showing off his erudition, even when it has little to do with the story he’s telling.

Similar intellectual pyrotechnics characterized another of his bestsellers, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” (1989), which was set in modern times, but which displayed Mr. Eco’s fondness for the erudite.

But his new book is very tame, compared to the his earlier ones. There’s very little of the language games that made the earlier novels fun. Rarely, in this new book, does he qoute from other languages and from the myriad authors cited in his earlier books. Instead, his chief game is to find the comic books and the many other childhood adventure stories that defined his early years.

The books are readily available at his childhood home, and — in what is one of the major joys of this book — they are reproduced in loving detail and color in the book. This is as much a picture book as it is a novel. As Yambo recovers his memory, we see in detail the images that help restore his past. He discovers in his rambles among the rooms of his childhood home and what they still contain, for example, his “first encyclopedia,” the Nuovissimo Melzi, in its 1905 edition, and asks himself, “How many words do I know because I learned them there?” He also learns that his his nickname, “Yambo,” comes from a favorite children’s book that he has forgotten, “The Adventures of Ciuffettino.” Yambo, whose name he borrowed, was the author of that work.

He comes across 30 or so installments of the adventures of Buffalo Bill, and he notices that Buffalo Bill, in episodes of 1940 and 1941, is described as a guy from Romagna whose real name was Domenico Tombini. Buffalo Bill was totally Italian, it seems, and not at all an American. He also enjoys coming across Felix the Cat, the Katzanjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, and Jiggs and Maggie.

In recreating himself, Yambo decides “to proceed using the historian’s method, subjecting evidence to cross-examination. That is to say, when I was reading my books and notebooks from the fourth grade, 1940-41, I would also browse through the newspapers from the same years and, whenever, I could, put songs from those years on the record player.” In his investigations, the author also encounters “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” another book for chidren and the source of the title of this novel. He finds it “the most insipid tale ever conceived by the human brain,” but even so, the story has stirred his memory, and he thinks it has significance, and he can’t get it out of his mind.

What do have profound significance are two memories recounted in loving detail and at length. First is a heroic deed done among the partisans who resist the German occupiers of Italy at the end of World War II, and the second is his discovery that he loved intensely a young woman whose face he can no longer recall. Mr. Eco has written about the partisans before, but never so movingly. And his attempt to recall the deep love of his teen age years, his Beatrice, is central to the novel.

Does Yambo regain his memory? Does his attempt to restore his life by this detailed encounter with the books and images of his childhood succeed? Not really. Though the images reproduced in the book are often quite lovely, the story of Yambo’s attempt to restore his own life and memory isn’t. This is the thinnest of Mr. Eco’s books, and the one with the least amount of reward for the effort.

A very minor character in Mr. Eco’s 1989 novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” tells the book’s narrator, “You sometimes seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand up.” Mr. Eco’s new novel lacks solidity and collapses if you stand it up. Still, it is an entertaining read, even it it has only a bit of the wit we’ve come to associate with Umberto Eco.