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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: An Illustrated Novel
By Umberto Eco
Translated by Geoffrey Brock
Harcourt, 469 pages, $36.95

So, who is the "true" me? In fact, does such a thing as the "true me" even exist? Or, to reformulate the question in terms of old-fashioned existential angst: Am I, perhaps, living an "inauthentic" life? Am I burying my "true self" — whoever or whatever it may be — under a thickening crust of literary clichés, stereotyped roles and prefabricated yearnings? And if I truly am so alienated from my true self, how in the world can I find it again, that irreplaceable "me" that has, alas, but one life to live — and soon will die?

To answer this question, Italy's Umberto Eco has gone in search, vicariously, of Umberto Eco. At the beginning of his new novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, a prosperous 59-year-old dealer in rare books wakes up from a coma, or so it seems, to discover he has amnesia. And a weirdly selective form of amnesia it is. He remembers nothing about his personal life — his name, his history, his family, his profession — nothing about his personal emotions or desires or tastes. But he does remember virtually every text that he has ever read, and he certainly has read a lot. His interior monologue, during his first moments of consciousness, is a polyglot — and comically poetic — smorgasbord of literary citations and allusions. When asked for his name, he hems and haws for an instant, then blurts out, "My name is Arthur Gordon Pym." The doctor won't buy it, so he tries again: "Call me ..... Ishmael?"

Being, provisionally at least, nobody, our narrator figures he's perhaps a literary creation, an invention of Edgar Allan Poe or Herman Melville, a fictional personage on the threshold of an exotic, metaphysical adventure — in fact, an adventure rather like life. In reality, he is, his doctor tells him, Signor Giambattista Bodoni, a respectable bourgeois of Milan. But, as Paola, his wife, informs him, he goes by his childhood nickname: Yambo.

For the next 440-plus pages, we are kept strictly inside Yambo's head, restricted to his point of view, and the furnishings in Yambo's head bear an uncanny resemblance to the furnishings of the mind of Umberto Eco. Fifty-nine in 1991, the date of his stroke, Yambo would be about Eco's age (born in 1932); and he has, of course, large hunks of Eco's culture — an ability to conjure up literary allusions in at least four languages, an obsession with pop culture, a talent for teasing deep meanings out of apparent trivia — and a restless, goofy inability to stop thinking.

Then too, Yambo's experiences are those of Eco's generation: Italian fascism, the Second World War, Allied bombings, civil war between fascists and anti-fascists, occupation by the Germans and then the Allies, and the postwar economic boom of the "Italian Miracle." But, of course, Yambo is not Umberto Eco. Eco is the master, not the victim, of his material.

Virtually everything Yambo learns about himself is filtered through literary and cultural allusions, and Yambo is so cultivated, or so alienated, that he can't help but slip into parody and pastiche and citation. He adopts the voices and attitudes and mythologies of others so easily he loses himself in them — though of course he has, in a sense, no "self" to lose; he's inventing himself through parody. His mind is a collection of cultural artifacts: old comic books, illustrated novels, pop songs of the 1930s and '40s, and much else besides.

Using Yambo the way puppeteer Edgar Bergen (father of Candice) used to use Charlie McCarthy, Eco exercises a virtuoso, comic-pathetic command over styles and genres, and indulges himself — occasionally a trifle too transparently — in an analysis of the pop culture of the fascist period.

When, for example, Yambo discovers he has, in his book business, a beautiful Polish assistant, Sibilla, he cannot help but wonder if — before he lost his memory — he had an affair with her, and so he generates, in a paroxysm of literary clichés, all the possible melodramatic scenarios and forms their relationship might have taken. This is amorous obsession run wild, and it's the type of situation in which most frequently, in fact, life copies literature.

In order to recover his childhood, Yambo goes to Solara, the family's farm house up in the mountains. Here, Eco really has fun. Rummaging through attics and cellars and long-closed rooms, Yambo uncovers old children's books, records, comic books and encyclopedias, rediscovering the cultural history of his own moderately privileged childhood in fascist Italy. The popular culture — and children's culture — of that period was a strange mixture of sentimental, swooning songs and virile, militaristic rhetoric; of racism, xenophobia and autarchic nationalism with the wholesale importing of foreign cultural influences from the "decadent democracies," France, Britain and the United States.

In his explorations, Yambo rediscovers his various epiphanies as a child, including the deliciously voluptuous pubescent discovery of various forms of torture (illustrated!) in an old encyclopedia. Are we witnessing here the birth in little Yambo of sadomasochistic tendencies? But, although they are emotional dynamite, these are still merely cultural memories — third-person memories — and the true first-person story is still missing.

Then it seems, or it is suggested, that Yambo has another stroke. This takes him to another level of memory: the first-person memory in which he rediscovers his childhood, and his involvement in a traumatic episode in the Resistance when two German prisoners are murdered, as well as his first sexual obsession and his alienation from the sexually extremely repressive Catholicism of the time. Centred on a comic-book image of Queen Loana, the novel ends in a literary parody of a crescendo of desire culminating, perhaps, in Yambo's death.

Really, when you are reading The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, you want to have a stack of old records by your side, a pile of comic books and a radio that can magically tune in to the broadcasts of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Eco recreates an incredible sense of the period. It made me nostalgic for experiences I have never had.

And it made me want to apply the Yambo method to my own life: to return to the comic books, radio shows, magazines and early TV shows that gave me my memories, and that, even though now forgotten, certainly still mould my tastes and yearnings.

Eco's book is not only a novel — and not only a cultural history — it's also a how-to book: "how to discover one's true self by digging in the attic of one's mind." When people are looking for things like the "inner goddess" or the "inner warrior," maybe it would be more productive to look at old comic books, TV series and movies — the trivia, in short, of which our souls are made. Excavating Yambo, it seems to me that Umberto Eco, the bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, has struck gold once again.

Gilbert Reid lived for many years in Italy. His collection of short stories, So This is Love (2004), will appear in the United States next year.