Reviews

The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel by Geoffrey Brock, Umberto Eco

jufira42's review

adventurous challenging emotional informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

flying_monkey's review

challenging informative mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Another Eco I hadn't read before, this one is a dense collage of imagery that takes place largely inside the mind of Yambo, an ageing antiquarian book dealer who has suffered some kind of aneurysm and has been in a coma, which has left him without much of a memory of anything in his life. At the urging of his wife (who of course he also can't remember), Paola, he takes a trip to his childhood home, a palatial country house that he still owns but rarely visits, leaving most of it, likes his memories, locked up and inaccessible. As he sorts through his and his family's books, records, comics, photographs and diaries, his mind wanders in all directions, fictional and real, a palimpsest of personal, cultural and political history, tracing the subjects of childhood, often obscure Italian and American pop-culture, sex and fascism. It even has illustrations. It's all of Eco in one book and it should be great but even though the writing can at times be sublime, too often it's just lists of things and Yambo's directionless musing and his frankly tedious obsession with his 'perfect woman'. And the ending is such a cliché that it really puts a cap on it. A long way from his best.

rlaurene's review

3.0

It was the wonderfully lurid and pulpy cover that drove me to this model, promising some mysterious tales.

I made the mistake of getting the wrong end of the stick, expecting a very different book to the one presented, one which could have had an awful lot of fun with the premise of the elderly Yambo losing his memory in an unspecified accident, and trying to recover it through the books of his youth.

Ultimately, the switch between the two halves of the book is a jarring one, and the recovery of his memories feels unearned (despite the 250+ pages it takes to get to that point.)

Nevertheless, the characters are all engaging and well-rounded (with the obvious exception of Lila, atop her pedestal), and the big incident that defined young Yambo's life is worthy, and itself makes good story.