The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

This remarkable illustrated novel is Eco's most accessible and bestselling book since THE NAME OF THE ROSE.

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood.

His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost. But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school and morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image - the schoolgirl he never forgot.

Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves and other printed ephemera, THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME is a fascinating and hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto Eco.

Reading Group Book Questions

1. Discuss the use the author makes of illustrations. How did you find they altered the experience of reading a novel?
2. Think about the theme of memory in the book – both the way Yambo uses his childhood reading to regain his, and also what we are without our memories.
3. What sort of a picture emerges from the novel of Italy under Fascist rule?

About The Author

Umberto Eco is the author of several bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.