Umberto Eco The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana [pdf]

Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana [PDF]

Format: PDF
File Size: 21.9 MB
Language: English
Published By HARCOURT, INC., 2004
481 pages

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10503.The_Mysterious_Flame_of_Queen_Loana

When aging Italian book-dealer Yambo, hero of this engaging if somewhat bloodless novel of ideas, regains consciousness after a mysterious coma, he suffers a peculiar form of amnesia. His public memory of languages, everyday routines, history and literature remains intact, but his autobiographical memory of personal experiencesof his family, lovers, childhood, even his nameis gone. He can spout literary and cultural allusions on any topic, citing everything from Moby-Dick to Star Trek, but complains, I dont have feelings, I only have memorable sayings. To recover his past, he repairs to his boyhood home to peruse a cache of memorabilia amassed in his youth during Mussolinis reign and WWII, consisting of comic books, schoolbooks, Fascist propaganda, popular music, romantic novels and his own poetry about an unattainable high school beauty. The setup allows semiotician and novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose, etc.) to indulge his passion for pulp materials by reproducing such objects as movie posters, song lyrics and a graphic novella rendering the Book of Revelation as a Flash Gordon melodrama, with intriguing asides on cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind thrown in. The result has a somewhat academic feel, but its an absorbing exploration of how that most fundamental master-narrative, our memory, is pieced together from a bricolage of pop culture. - Publishers Weekly

_____________________________________CONTENTS_____________________________________

PART ONE: THE INCIDENT
1. The Cruelest Month 3
2. The Murmur of Mulberry Leaves 28
3. Someone May Pluck Your Flower 45
4. Alone through City Streets I Go 64

PART TWO: PAPER MEMORY
5. Clarabelles Treasure 81
6. II Nuovissimo Melzi 90
7. Eight Days in an Attic 117
8. When the Radio 159
9. But Pippo Doesnt Know 178
10. The Alchemists Tower 212
11. Up There at Capocabana 227
12. Blue Skies Are on the Way 257
13. The Pallid Little Maiden 272
14. The Hotel of the Three Roses 295

PART THREE: OI NOZTOI
15. Youre Back at Last, Friend Mist! 301
16. The Wind Is Whistling 325
17. The Provident Young Man 379
18. Lovely Thou Art as the Sun 406

SOURCES OF CITATIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 451