A Book Review of Umberto Eco's Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

What happened to Post-Modernism? As far as critical obscurity goes in the Where Are They Now column (Curvo-Linear Stylists, anyone?) Post-Modernism is nowhere to be seen, simply because it is ubiquitous and means nothing - and not the kind of Nothing that Beckett wanted his readers to see (or not to see, etc). Post-Modernism is everywhere and everything: Seen any Geico commercials lately? How about the one which references the Old Navy commercials, itself a reference on �70s camp, glam, and pomp? You see what's happened there? They know you know. The effect of Post-Modernism's big joke is the laugh on the inside, one of those smug solipsistic laughs. The problem is that we are now laughing at, not with, Post-Modernism.

Authors are having a good time wearing it thin, too. Instead of the old-world values of pastiche and parody, the absurdist anti-hero, the wordplay that amounted to unfixing fixed ideas, the plotless plotline, those men in bathtubs, those salad days of Ulysses, Pale Fire, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, even the T&A sophomorism of Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, contemporary Post-Modernism's literature is nothing more than top-billing flash run amok, streaking bare-assed across the Featured Authors section at any Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Nobles megalopolis. Jonathan Safran Foers - going to end your new novel with a fifty page flipbook? Backwards, too? Hello! Dave Eggers - no longer interested in stories, only dust-jacketless book design? No problem! Philip Roth - alternate reality with reference book included, a quarter of the size of the novel itself? Pleased to meet you! How about another retread on the Sherlock Holmes character? Welcome, Chabon! Top of the world, Mitch Cullin! Howdy, Caleb Carr! The market is so saturated with the biz that arch-critic James Wood proclaimed in The New Republic:

"The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and substories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs…. What are these busy stories and substories evading? It might be said that these recent novels are full of inhuman stories, whereby that phrase is precisely an oxymoron, an impossibility, a wanting-it-both-ways."

So, when Umberto Eco, who can have it both ways, as achieved in Foucault's Pendulum and the Name of the Rose (think The Da Vinci Code for semantics professors and theologians, respectively; insert your own Dan Brown joke here), both novels Post-Modernist and best-sellers, each dependent upon what the author describes as "the most metaphysical and philosophical: the detective novel," where the mystery revolves around the suspicious reader himself; the fact that both of these novels work oddly oxymoronic: post-structuralist page-turners, metafictional finger-burners; and both of these books satisfy the reader's mischievous curiosity, containing genuine moments of laughter, and, ultimately, sending shivers of what Nabokov calls "artistic satisfaction up the reader's spine," this same reader would expect more in the hands of the Italian master in his new novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel (Harcourt, 2005, $27).

While not exactly Post-Modern, nor "straight," this is a novel of memory loss and the recovery of memory through childhood paraphernalia. "I am a memory come alive," Franz Kafka said, and Eco has taken this idea and run a marathon with it. Fifty-nine year-old Giambattista "Yambo" Bodini awakes in a hospital after an unspecified "incident." His doctor asks if he remembers his name. After trying "Arthur Gordon Pym," and being told this is not his name (rather the name of Poe's stowaway), he takes another stab:

"Call me…Ishmael?"

Yambo does not recognize his wife Paola, his children or their children, the last remaining photograph of his parents, his home, his antique bookshop, his young and beautiful Yugoslavian assistant (or if he has had an affair with her, unrequited or no), the fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of Kennedy. He is shocked when his childhood friend Gianni tells him about that he has had many adulterous relationships. But, as a rare book dealer, and a voracious reader, he has total recall of every novel, every line of verse: "I said to myself: Yambo, your memory is made of paper. Not of neurons, but of pages." In an effort to recover his past, he travels to his boyhood home, to the hills of Solara. It is here where Eco's allegrissimo, this exciting, forward movement of the first quarter of the book (who is this Yambo and just what had he been up to?), slackens and goes all allegretto. The novel comes to a halt and never quite recovers. Basta!

Maybe the problem is in a statement such as this. In a recent interview, Eco stated, "I wanted to make a Gedankenexperiment: what could happen to a person who only lives through, by, within books he has read, without personal, tactile memories."

That word means �thought experiment,' by the way. Sounds like fun for the writer. Not so much for the audience who has to endure Yambo life-search in the various rooms of the Solara house, through his old comic books (the plots of most retold… for whose benefit?), his stamp collection, his grandfather's record collection, old biscotti tins, and exotic cigarette packets; not only are these personal curiosities recounted, they are also emblazoned visually between stacks of prose (hence the subtitle An Illustrated Novel). Using these dusty relics as a cue, Yambo is able to reconfigure pockets of World War II epiphanies - the historiography, the propaganda, the machinations of Mussolini and company, the fear. One of Post-Modernism's great caveats is the story within the story, or the story being told outside the story - extra-textual. But with Eco's main character static and sat, these many narratives within the narrative lack the substance needed for effect. Instead, this is all the fun of watching a toddler trying to find Goldbug.

And just who is this Queen Loana?

"I opened the album and encountered the most insipid tale ever conceived by the human brain… Loana goes hither and thither, pointlessly enigmatic, through an incredibly slipshod narrative that lacks both charm and psychology." Of course Eco's prose is blessed with charm and supereminence. There's no getting around the fact that this writer is a master of language and rhythm. But what should be sweet elixir (sensual prose such as this: "Seeking an alternative faith I become enamored of the decadents. Brothers, sad lilies, I pine for beauty…I become a Byzantine eunuch watching the great white barbarians go by and composing indolent acrostics."), is instead anodyne for a dull head. What the novel lacks is blood, thrust, flame; and quite frankly, there is simply not enough movement or interaction for the audience to see the author's own psychological know-how. The third act of the novel attempts to recalibrate all the forward tilt of the opening salvo - specifically, Yambo's first childhood love ("Lila should have remained a nice adolescent memory, the sort everyone has. Instead, I had looked for her the rest of my life… She had blond hair almost down to her waist, a face somewhere between angelic and devilish."), but with so much time lost, the thing huffs and puffs, and is eventually rendered comatose under the weight of its own incredible intellectual slab.

Perhaps The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is best enjoyed if the reader can mentally position himself in an attic; or perhaps in the reading room, belvedere seat, legs crossed, with a glass of Negus or xeres. Don't know these spirits? Obscure? Welcome to Umberto Eco's new novel.