Two Books by Umberto Eco

            Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Italy, was known for his vast scholarly erudition, which he displays both in his nonfiction, such as On Literature and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, and in his novels, like the Medieval mystery The Name of the Rose, and the conspiracy theory-enamored Foucault's Pendulum.

            In 2004, Eco published a new novel (released in English translation in 2005) called The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  Unlike his previous novels, this work was light on erudition (at least by Eco's standards) and heavy on autobiographical elements.  The story concerns Yambo, a rare book dealer of approximately Eco's age (and also like Eco, from Milan) who wakes from a coma with an unusual form of amnesia: he can remember almost nothing of his personal past, but seems to have an eidetic memory for all the literature he has read in his long life; as a result, passages from various books float into his consciousness as different experiences trigger associations with them.  This is one of the forms Eco's famous erudition takes in the book—one much lighter than the forms it has taken in some of his earlier works.

            Yambo retreats to his family home, where he attempts to restore his lost memory by reading through much of the literature---especially popular literature---that has shaped him and his generation.  One of these works, a comic with a plot very reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard's She, gives its name to Eco's novel.

            Yambo's quest, which evolves into a quest to recover the memory of his first love, constitutes the essence of the novel.  He sifts through and interacts with various works, many images from which appear throughout the book (making it to some degree an illustrated novel).  As he does so, he relives the story of his generation.  It is here that we discover the autobiographical elements in the novel, and we do so via comparison with another book published by Eco in 2006 (English translation: 2007).

            Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, is a collection of cultural essays by Eco, published in Italian newspapers between 2000 and 2005.  As with all of Eco's essays, they are intelligent, entertaining, and thought-provoking (not to mention providing American readers with a perspective on post-9-11 events from outside the English-speaking world).  What is intriguing about them is how they provide a window into Eco's past, his personal life, and his thought processes during the same time as he was writing The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  Comparing the two books, we find several common elements.  Of course, we would expect Italian Fascism to play a role, but what about Dick Tracy?  He makes an appearance in both books.  Also, in both the novel and one of the essays from Turning Back the Clock, Eco quotes the same line from a Humphrey Bogart film: "That's the power of the press, baby!"

Finally, we see the autobiographical core of the novel revealed when Eco recounts in his essays two events from his life which occur in almost identical form in the life of Yambo.  First, he notes how, the day after Fascism ended, numerous new political parties surfaced in the papers, and how he realized, despite being very young at the time, that they had existed in some form also during Fascism.  In the novel, Yambo discovers a paper from immediately after the end of fascism, with numerous political parties featured.  He realizes that he must have had at that time the very same epiphany as his real-life counterpart—that they had been there, underground, all along.

            Perhaps the clearest indication of the autobiographical roots of Eco's novel is the fact that Yambo discovers that the first Allied soldier he met after the end of the war was a black American soldier.  In one of his essays, Eco says the very same thing about himself.

In the end, Yambo slips back into a coma—as he comes, eventually, to believe—and for the final section of the book, the reader is in his mind as he experiences various dreams and visions culled from his extensive reading.  Here, Eco allows his erudition much fuller play than earlier in the novel.

            The educated reader may take pleasure in realizing that the final section of these visions, although ostensibly drawn from such popular works as Flash Gordon, are described in language and contain events reminiscent of the visions in the final book of the Bible, the Apocalypse.  And so, Eco's novel ends, as the Bible ends, with visions of the end of a world.  However, while the Bible told of the end of a city called Babylon the Great and the world she knew, we realize that the world that ends at the close of Yambo's story...is Yambo himself.