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Literary Review
ENDAPAPER
The tireless reader
By Pradeep Sebastian
UMBERTO ECO isn't giving us the one thing we so badly want from him: a sequel to The Name of the Rose. Since Foucault's Pendulum, he hasn't given us anything as exciting as those erudite medieval mysteries that mixed low and highbrow with such jolly and startling scholarship. His new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (translated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock, Harcourt, 2005, p.480, $27) has a delightful premise: an antiquarian book dealer wakes up from a coma and remembers only the books he has read. The book is illustrated: black and white and colour pictures from highbrow and popular culture — Flash Gordon, Phantom, Mandrake, Fantomas, Verne, Wells, Dumas, lovely volumes with an ancient air, cigarette boxes with exotic foreign sounding names (including Gold Flake!), postage stamps and the original drawings that accompanied the Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand. The illustrations and plates, so rich and magical and nostalgic, alone are worth the price of the book, but, happily, even the text is a joy. This is the book Eco has been reaching to write all along: a story with words and pictures.
Playful erudition
Yambo, the Milanese rare-book-dealer hero of the book (a fictitious version of Eco himself?) can only recall words, not images! Each antiquarian book in Yambo's collection (numbering more than 5,000!) is 500 hundred years old and more expensive than a Porsche. His wife calls him a "tireless reader" with an "iron memory". From page one, Eco delights us with his playful erudition by planting pop culture references without telling us from which book or movie or comic book they come from, so that we can have fun spotting them for ourselves. "`And what's your name?' `Wait, it's on the tip of my tongue.' That is how it all began". And that is how the book begins and the reader quickly figures out that the one asking the questions is the doctor, with Yambo answering from an encyclopaedic fog. His responses, spoken and thought, are lines from books he has read. "Call me... Ishmael?" answers Yambo tentatively. No, that's not your name insists the doctor. What month is it? Yambo asks. April, says the doctor and Yambo replies, "April is the cruellest month." "Are you married? You tell me. What if I mistake her for a hat? Excuse me? There was a man who mistook his wife for a hat".
And then, like the pages of an encyclopaedia floating in his head, the book dealer summons literary references from his otherwise amnesiac head: "Where fog hovers between the towers like incense dreaming? My soul was wiping the streetcar windows so it could drown in the moving fog of the headlamps. The fog comes on little cat feet, Maigret plunges into a fog — Maigret? Elementary, my dear Watson, there are ten little Indians, and the hound of the Baskervilles vanishes into the fog. Vienna: the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the third man, Harry Lime up on that Ferris wheel at the Prater saying that the Swiss invented cuckoo clocks. He lied: Cuckoo clocks are Bavarian. Finally I came into a vast chasm and could see a colossal figure, wrapped in a shroud, its face the immaculate whiteness of snow. My name is Arthur Gordon Pym."
By now, anyone reading this with some knowledge of literature and pop culture would have caught most of the references. But as the book progresses the references, in typical Eco fashion, get more obscure and strange and wondrous. "Love that within my mind discourses with me, the love that moves the sun and the other stars, stars hide your fires, the heart does not take orders. Often have I encountered the evil of living. Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." With sneaking suspicion the reader suddenly realises that some of these quotes could be Yambo's own version — a conflation of what he has read and his own riffs on them! For, after all, that is the kind of delightful inter-textual mischief Eco has been up to all along — juxtaposing theology and detective fiction, the ancient and the contemporary (Yambo's Ph.D. thesis we learn was on the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" — a pop reference and in joke on The Rule of Four) text and image. "Quotations," confesses Yambo, "are my only fog lights."
Beguiling book
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana goes on a bit too long, and the brisk pacing, the buoyant comic tone and the pop culture loaded first part of the book gives way to (meandering, and slowly paced) history, romance and a detailed description of Eco's childhood reading. Is Eco, sly entertainer, hinting that readers invent the books they read and even their own characters? Reading this odd and beguiling addition to the genre of Book about Books, all book lovers will recognise some part of themselves in Yambo, the tireless reader who loves even the sound and feel of the thumb flipping the pages of a book in reverse. This is the reader as hero, the reader as character, the reader who becomes the book. pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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