THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA
Umberto Eco
Secker Warburg £17.99, 480 pages

In Augustine’s Confessions, self-discovery is depicted as a process in which our thoughts are “collected and gathered together from their dispersions”. Augustine believed that the soul can be mistaken about its own nature and that it comes to know itself through the conquest of division - one assembles the scraps of oneself into an authentic self-understanding which Augustine called “memoria”.

Giambattista Bodoni, the narrator of Umberto Eco’s new novel, is a devotee of Augustine. And early on, Bodoni, a Milanese antiquarian book dealer known to his family and friends as “Yambo” - for reasons that become clear only gradually - takes a copy of the Confessions from his bookcase and searches for the passages on memory. He finds the following sentences underlined: “In the enormous palace of my memory, heaven, earth, and sea are present to me... I find myself there also... Great is the power of memory.” Stirring stuff, but Yambo complains to his wife that in order properly to inhabit the palace of memory (and therefore really to know himself), he’d have to be able to reassemble in proper order all the bits of information his loved ones are giving him.

And the reason Yambo is being fed this information by others is that he has suffered an unspecified neurological trauma (a stroke in all likelihood), which has left him lacking what his doctor calls “autobiographical” or “episodic” memory. Yambo’s “semantic” memory is intact, so he is able to summon up recondite historical facts and the rudiments of Pythagoras’s theorem. But it is “episodic” memory that turns a bundle of disparate thoughts and impressions into a self. When his daughter warns him not to put his back out, only to realise that her father isn’t aware that he suffers from orthostatic pressure, Yambo observes that he has another chapter for his “future autobiography... written by someone else”.

Eco is an inveterate player of metafictional games. It is hard to shake off the thought here that he is putting in Yambo’s mouth a definition of first-person narration in fiction. For what else could the novel told in the first person be but an “autobiography written by someone else”? And, indeed, it wouldn’t be too fanciful to read The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana in its entirety as an argument about the autobiographical mode, in which the Augustinian tendency is contrasted with one that treats the unity of the self as an illusion.

It turns out that Yambo’s stroke is the second defining catastrophe of his life. Both his parents were killed in a car crash just as he was about to leave home for university (he is now nearly 60). His wife tells him that his parents’ deaths “split [his] life into two parts” and at Solara, a wing of which she renovated as a holiday home, represented for him a past he wished to leave behind. She is sure that the keys to her husband’s autobiographical memory are to be found there.

In the longest section of the novel, Yambo holes up at Solara, with only his parents’ octogenarian housekeeper for company, and begins to sift through the relics of his childhood and adolescence that have been gathering dust for half a century in the abandoned “central wing” of the house. He tries to reassemble himself from the fragments of 1930s and 1940s comic books and fascist propaganda tracts, illustrations from which are interspersed throughout the text.

But Yambo’s model in this attempt is not Augustine, but Sherlock Holmes, whom he imagines, like himself, shut away in an attic, “motionless and isolated from the world, deciphering pure signs”. And the reference to Holmes tells us effectively that the fictional treatment of Yambo’s search for self has given way to a more familiarly Ecovian, and oddly unaffecting, immersion in the historical source material. Yambo says at one point that he is gripped by “research fever”, and it’s tempting also to apply the description to his creator.

Eco has written elsewhere that “knowledge is a source of pleasure”; this novel is confirmation that he prizes facts over the uncertainties of fiction.