Experience: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by U. Eco
An experience of pure ego and little joy
Found on the free shelf, abandoned in the Philosophy Department of my college, I plucked it up in a flurry of nostalgia during my 5 year reunion. Joined by a friend of too many years we decided that if any book was worthy of ownership, it was a book by the famed Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose, named dropped by any grasping literarian. Foucault’s Pendulum, read in the summer of everyone’s junior year, simply because Foucault was quintessence of intellectualism at the tender age of 20.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
The concept of the story was gripping.
What if I also had lost my memory, and all I remembered was the scattering of Mario Benedetti poems and Tolkien? What if I could only describe the wall of the convent Jean Valjean and Cosette climbed running away for Javert, but could not recall the wall of my childhood bedroom? Gripping, indeed. I am constantly drawn toward book based on a thought experiment. Case in point: watch me slowly drift toward any Jose Saramago novel.
“‘And what’s your name?’
‘Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue.’
That is how it all began.” (3)
The book ended exactly where it began…”as if I had awoken from a long sleep, and yet I was still suspended in a milky gray.” (3) Only Eco would be capable of writing a story so poetic, so dripping in philosophical explorations of memory and love and passion, and have it be a glorified bibliography of every book a young boy growing up during WWII in Italy would read. Comics, encyclopedias, novels, plays, philosophers- an exhaustive list of Flash Gordon and Queen Loanas.
I began it with interest,
with a hope that I would somehow become illuminated in the mystery of memory and exploration of identity. I ended it by skimming, determined to finish the damn thing and be done with it. The space on my bookshelf that it had vacated was aching to be filled again. Another book, less bibliographic, was calling my name. My eyes kept lifting from the page, gazing at absence.
I kept reading, even after only a few pages I realized the protagonist was exactly the type of man I would completely avoid in real life: a womanizing, self-indulgent, full of presumed importance, seemingly intelligent, and wholly engulfed in his own self. Perhaps (hopefully?), this was Eco’s intent. But I have learned to avoid conversations about the author’s intent. That’s a conversation for another day.
The ‘hero’s’ obsession with his assistant turns into a realization that his whole life he has been searching for his highschool sweetheart. This is a sweetheart that he only stalked and wrote terrible poetry for. Sigh. Yet another Twilight-esque book about teenager’s pure acts of fucked up love. I inwardly groaned. Yambo, the memory-addled bumbler of an antique book collector, has desperately looked for Lila’s face in every woman he meets. Obsession is what breaks him, is what ruins his memory, is what sends him into a coma.
Perhaps that is the lesson buried in this tome of a list (is it really a novel?).
The lesson: The more you search for your fictionalized love of a youth long past, the closer to death you become.
Every Wednesday in our home is Analog Night. We turn off cell phones, unplug the internet, and only use technology if it is to play music. I spent the whole night in a desperate frenzy to finish with the mysterious flames. I flipped forward to the end and saw that the last 15 pages, one half of them were full page images. Good. I would finish even faster.
I finished in a furious flurry, feeling like I deserved a pat of the back. I almost didn’t realize that the actual bibliography in the back wasn’t a continuation of the story. I felt betrayed by this phenomenal writer, and by my own immense ego.
Have you ever read a book that you know in reality you just should put down and move on to another one, one that will actually fulfill your desires and needs, but you just HAVE to finish? It’s all about pride. It’s integrity, damn it. It’s that chance to be able to answer the question: “What did you read lately?” and have it not be that excellent piece of speculative fiction that you are semi-embarrassed about because of societal pressures of what is good literature, but “Oh, I just finished an Umberto Eco novel.”
Enter ego stroking here.
The experience of the Flames was a negative one entirely of my own doing. It was a stroking of my ego, just as the story was a stroking of Yambo’s. And it could be that I became trapped in Yambo’s ego, thinking only of my perception and my journey as he did. I happily put it back in line, alphabetically, on my shelf. It will stay there, so when my brilliant friends visit they will peruse my shelf and stroke their chins, impressed I have an Eco on my shelf that is so obviously read.
Be honest, we’ve all done this.
