The mysterious flame of Queen Loana

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The mysterious flame of Queen Loana is the title of the fifth novel by Umberto Eco . In the Italian original, La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana , it appeared in June 2004 and only four months later in the German translation by Burkhart Kroeber .

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When asked how he is, the hero and can narrator of the book initially only answer. "Wait, I've got it on the tongue" Giambattista Bodoni called Yambo, awakened by an unspecified discussed accident, possibly a stroke , from a long and deep coma : he was around sixty at the time, was an antiquarian by trade and lived in Milan with his wife Paola. He only learns all of this from others, however, because since the accident he has lost the memory of everything that concerns him personally, his biographical or episodic memory , but retained the semantic memory: he still remembers how to drive a car, but he no longer knows what his car is; he still knows what museums and monuments there are in Milan, but he can no longer say whether he has ever visited them. He doesn't even recognize his wife anymore and he has forgotten all of his childhood.

After he has taken the first steps into his usual everyday life again, his wife advises him to go on a search for his childhood in order to find his memory again. So he goes to the place where he spent the summer holidays as a child and the war years 1943–45 when he was eleven to thirteen: his grandfather's country house in the southern Piedmontese mountains, a spacious building with a broad main section and two side wings on a slope above of the village of Solara. This is the location of the second of the three parts of the book, "A Paper Memory", in which Yambo systematically explores the place of his childhood, which fortunately has remained almost untouched and still contains most of his former possessions. The name Solara already indicates the symbolic meaning of this place: As Eco has indicated on various occasions, the Piedmontese town of Solero is hidden behind it - the Italian word “solare” means “sunny”, “cheerful” and therefore suggests a happy childhood . For days Yambo rummaged through the spacious attic of this house and its rooms, some of which had not been entered for decades, and tried to reconstruct his childhood - including the one - based on the books and pictures, tea caddies and cigarette boxes, comic books and exercise books, old newspapers and shellac records found there The novel's somewhat strange title is taken from an old Italian comic from the 1930s. What emerges from this reconstruction is a portrait of a childhood in Italy between 1938 and 1945, characterized by a fascist upbringing in school and the simultaneous suppression of fascism in everyday life, by war and evacuation and finally, towards the end of the war, by the resistance struggle of the partisans against the German occupiers.

The last part of the book is headed "OI NOΣTOI" in Greek letters ( hoi nostoi , "The Homecoming", an allusion to the ancient Greek epics of the return of the heroes from Troy): When Yambo rummaging around in old boxes, unexpectedly for an original When the famous folio edition of Shakespeare's works from 1623 comes in - what as an antiquarian immediately recognizes an immeasurably valuable find - he falls into a coma again from sheer excitement. In this state, however, his personal memory slowly returns, and he experiences a series of situations from his childhood during the war in a kind of delusional fever, about which he - lying in a coma until the end - tells in a kind of inner monologue which, however, storm at him in a completely disorderly manner. Suddenly the nights in the air raid shelter come back to his mind when a bomb alarm was given in his hometown, or the first encounters with partisans in Solara, where the family had fled from the bombs, or the long conversations about God and the world with his older friend and teacher Gragnola, or the evenings in the kitchen when he dreamed of distant lands over his stamp collection while his grandfather was listening to radio London , or the great story of the glorious victory of the boys from Solara over those of the neighboring town of San Martino, and finally he clearly remembers - always lying in a coma - a dramatic adventure towards the end of the war, when he and his friend Gragnola (who died in the process) helped a group of partisans to escape from German SS patrols. This episode is told very vividly and vividly over 20 pages (pp. 396–416) and is certainly one of the most impressive in the novel. The last chapters relate to memories of the immediate post-war period in the hometown of the young Yambo (in which Ecos hometown Alessandria can easily be recognized), of his life as a high school student and above all of his first love, the schoolgirl Lila, who was always adored from afar. It is ultimately this memory that excites the dreaming in a coma so much that he forces himself to finally wake up from his deep sleep - with the help of the "good Queen Loana" whom he called - to see Lilia again. The last pages of the book prepare the phantasized appearance of the girl Lila and the awakening of Yambo with a fantastic series of pictures from old Flash Gordon albums and other comics (all of which are shown in large format in the book), mixed with private memories. It remains to be seen whether this will happen. The last lines of the novel read:

“But a light mist, a mouse-gray fumifugium swells at the top of the stairs and covers the entrance. I feel a cold breath, I lift my eyes. Why does the sun suddenly turn so black? ”.

Literary meaning

Of all of Eco's novels, this fifth is certainly the one that contains the most autobiography. Eco is the same age as his hero Yambo, he also lives in Milan, albeit not as an antiquarian (but as a regular customer of antiquarians), he had a very similar childhood to Yambo in the same places as he and also owns most of the objects depicted in the book who have favourited Yambo in the attic in Solara. Many episodes from Yambo's childhood and youth, including an essay by the ten-year-old from 1942 (the “Year XX of the Fascist Era”), which he finds among his belongings, are familiar to attentive readers of Eco from his “ Match Letters ” and from the essay “How I write ”(in the volume Die Bücher und das Paradies. Über Literatur , Munich 2004), where Eco tells them as stories from his own childhood and youth. However, he says he did not experience the dramatic adventure with the partisans himself, but was told by a friend. In addition to many similarities between the author and his hero, one can of course also find differences between them, e.g. For example, when asked whether he had written something of his own, Yambo describes himself, interestingly enough, as a “sterile genius” and claims that one can only either read or write. So you finally realize that Eco was more about writing the biography of his generation. He achieves this through several means, not least by designing the book as an “illustrated novel”: The protagonist's journey into his past is accompanied by numerous images of old book covers, posters, pictures and everyday objects. Because Yambo can no longer remember and has to reconstruct everything like an outsider, the events presented gain objectivity and general validity; The same applies to the way in which Eco uses popular hits and fascist hymns from his childhood: they are also historical testimonies from Italy in the 1930s. With the help of all these tricks, Eco describes the cosmos of his childhood in the most comprehensive, even encyclopedic way possible.

This novel also benefits from Eco's erudition. You can understand it as a small personal counterpart to Marcel Proust's great cycle of novels In Search of Lost Time , but you can also find many other quotes - often on the subject of the fog, which plays an important role - their way into the book, not least Eco's favorite novella , the short story Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval (which he wrote about in detail in The Books and Paradise ). In addition, terms such as “OI NOSTOI” or the often misunderstood scene in which Yambo ponders his excrement, pay homage to great works of Western literature, such as Homer's Odyssey , or James Joyce's Ulysses , to whom the structure of the novel is also based remind. Finally, as in Baudolino , Eco allows himself the joke of quoting one of his own novels - here The Foucault Pendulum , to the end of which the passage in the middle of the book refers (p. 242), where it is means: "I asked myself what I was actually looking for, what I wanted, it would not be enough to sit here and look at the hill, which is as beautiful as it says at the end of that novel, which was it the same? "

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