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.

Ancient Evenings (1983)

Mailer, Norman. Ancient Evenings. Random House, 2014.

Norman Mailer, whom David Foster Wallace classed with Philip Roth and John Updike as "the Great Male Narcissists" of postbellum American realism, wrote thick volumes of historical fiction (or New Journalism as the school is called), from his 1948 war novel The Naked and the Dead to the 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of state-executed Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song, to a sprawling 1991 history of the CIA called Harlot's Ghost that secured its place on the actual CIA's required reading list. Though the credit for pioneering the New Journalism often goes to the 1966 publication of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, or even farther back to the 1930s publications of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, Mailer's personality, for better or worse, looms over the literary landscape. In interviews and articles, his ego glares and bites, and the size of his books are commensurate with this pompousness (even when he wrote a shorter book it would be something like The Gospel According to the Son, with Jesus Christ as narrator). His final novel, his final statement, was The Castle in the Forest, an intimate meditation on Hitler. The common thread that runs through Mailer's oeuvre is an appropriation and rewriting of history. It's no surprise, then, that Mailer would at some point take on the wonders and mystery of ancient Egyptian civilization. And he's in rare form here, hearkening back to pre-Judeo-Christian morals (something he seems to enjoy) and immersing himself in the mythology and culture of Pharonic Egypt. The book opens with a scene of reincarnation, as told in the first-person by the one being reincarnated (everyone should at least read this masterclass of imaginative writing), as he crosses a metaphysical gulf and awakens to his second life within the tomb of Khufu in the great pyramid. For all of Mailer's chauvinism and braggadocio, one cannot help but savor the poetic richness of the language employed to bring these ancient evenings to life; there is nothing else in his repertoire quite like this.