The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004)

Eco, Umberto. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Harcourt, 2005.

For a bibliophile like Eco this is the perfect plot: our protagonist, the owner of a rare books store, wakes from a coma and can only remember everything he has learned all the books he's read. He cannot remember his name or his family, but he can quote and quip and pun liberally from his vast, mental literary repository. For the lover of literature this is the perfect book. The first chapter is entitled "The cruelest month" (an allusion to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land); the first sentence hints at the first sentence of Moby-Dick; and the second sentence smacks of Nabokov's striking opening of Lolita. As the patient grapples with his identity, he spouts off lines and characters from Poe, Melville, Dumas, Baudelaire, Doyle, and Stevenson. The protagonist will go on to reconstruct his identity by, well, reading it back into existence, naturally. Through the review of the diaries, letters, comic books, newspapers, etc. of the past, we join in the exploration and discovery of the way in which we both create and are created by culture. Eco extends the fascination with memory of such earlier precursors as Giulio Camillo (of L'Idea del Theatro fame) into the realm of the fiction novel in only the way Eco can. While the inimitable The Name of the Rose will always be the late Eco's most popular novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana maintains its own position in his bibliography.