Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Utter Crap December 1, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
has professor eco peaked already? has all his success gone into his head? does he think he has a band of followers ready to devour half eaten scraps he throws in the waste bin?
these are the sort of questions that cropped in my mind when i read this pompous, self indulgent time waster of a book. instead of any coherent narrative, we are treated to a ramshackle reminiscence of the books he read. and for what? i'm sure all of us , if we delve into our pasts, can bring out memories of books, comics, stories we devoured as children and growing adults. but it's only the plain vanity of umberto eco that he dares to present these memories in a book, with the figment of a story to hold them together, and sell it to us, unsuspecting as we are, hoping for another "foucault's pendulum". in all honesty, he should actually pay people to read his book of memories, rather than sell the book
absolute and total waste of time, money and good paper. doesn't deserve any stars at all, but forced to give one because amazon doesn't allow negative or zero marks. all right, one star for the print quality
 Only the worst of Eco October 5, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have often joked that I would rather read Umberto Eco's shopping list than many of the so-called popular novels. In this book, Eco goes to prove me wrong. Eco has written a book that is a struggle to read, not because it is deep, complex, and rich but because it is an utter bore.
The story tells of the case of Yambo, a rare-book dealer living in Milan. Yambo suffers a curious brain injury straight out of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In his case, he can not recall anything that ever happened to him but he can remember every book he ever read. Curious. But Eco fails to do anything of much interest with this defect. For example, Yambo runs a book studio and has a female assistant. Yambo worries that perhaps he had an affair with her and wonders how she would react. He need not have worried, because like everyone else, she treats him with no mention of the past. Yambo's wife is perfectly accepting of his condition and Yambo is able to bluff his way through conversations with any friends or acquaintances he meets. The end result is that nothing much happens and the book drones on.
Yambo decides to ride off into the country to visit his childhood home in hopes that something there may trigger his memories. Yambo wonders around and gives us a detailed description of his bowel movements. "A lovely snail-shell structure still steaming." I was underwhelmed. Yambo wanders through the house finding secret rooms and reading old books. But none of this seems to go anywhere. In fact, it seems more like an excuse for Eco to discuss (although not in any detail), pre- and post-World War II Italian novels that Eco fondly remembers.
The book does pick up a little towards the final part but by then I just wished the book would end. I cared nothing for the main character of the story and found the whole enterprise an absolute chore to pull myself through. Eco has done much better. If you are a true fan then go ahead and read the book to see that Eco is, indeed, fallible. Otherwise choose one of his other books instead.
 fascinating and thought-provoking June 19, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm going somewhat against the grain of the other reviewers here by stating that this is a fantastic book. I found myself thinking and talking about it on all sorts of opportunities with all sorts of people, and not because this was the first time I had ever been asked to think about the relationship between memory and personality. For that is what this book is about: who are you if you don't remember the things you've done and experienced up until now? There's so much to say about the book, it's conceptualization of selfhood, the way that culture shapes the very core of our beings, the power of youthful love...
For me, though, the book resonates with a journey that so many of us take nowadays, a journey into our inner psyche. His personality wiped out by his memory loss, Yamba delves into his childhood in order to make sense of who he is today. Does this sound familiar? That's right, he's doing psychotherapy. Yamba's driving assumption - that if he can reconstruct the past, he will arrive at the "truth" of who he is today, and possibly correct certain flaws of his, such as his womanizing - is nothing if not the ideology at the very basis of today's immensely powerful therapeutic turn. As such, the constant repitition of "maybe this" and "perhaps that" seems quite in place. And the balance between events in the world out there (World War II) and those taken place within himself (his guilt surrounding the episode with the Cossacks, his love for Lila) also seems spot on.
The book's final act, with the protagonist in a coma once more, but this time swamped by memories from the past, yet now unable to do anything with them in the practical sense that led him to his explorations in his wartime house, sweeps the reader along in a rising tide of images, memories, expectation, until the book's satisfying and, I think, quite appropriate ending.
 A good read, but lacks an ending June 17, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
A 60 year old man wakes up unable to remember any of his own history, but with his factual memory intact. A visit to his childhood home provides a great excuse to revisit the literature, music and ephemera of childhood, from imported (and re-written) comics to old records and self-penned poems. And because this was during the war, we get a meditation on how propaganda is interpreted by the 'audience'.
The addition of pictures adds so much more to the nostalgia trip, and the publishers deserve credit for not talking Eco out of a move that must have required significant time to chase copyright permission, etc. If nothing else, this is a lovely document of pulp literature of the 40s and 50s.
But what about the story? Well, it's an odd one. Plot-wise you could call it 'voyage and return', at a push. And there's echoes of Fellini's 'Amarcord' in the era and the fog. There's enough here to keep you reading, and the second part of the book compellingly answers some questions posed in the first. But the ending... the ending is disappointing, doing nothing. Which is a shame, but doesn't detract from the enjoyable journey to get there, as original as you'd expect from Eco, if not as good as most of his other work.
Turgid test of stamina and patience June 16, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I have only ever not finished two books: The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell and...this one. That I did manage to hold out until page 231 of Eco's latest novel would suggest that I am still in a position to give a meaningful review.
Eco is my favourite living author. The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum are among my favourite novels. When I have read others' reviews of those two books in the past I have always scoffed at readers who have criticised Eco for his indulgent asides and flights of intellectual fancy. This is partly because I enjoyed them and also they did not detract from what were compelling page-turners. But, with Queen Loana, for the first time I 'didn't get it'.
The premise of the novel is this: rare and antiquarian book dealer from Milan suffers episodic memory loss (he can remember how to drive a car, or where Napleon was born, but doesn't recognise his wife) and retreats to his childhood bolthole in the country to pore over a hoarde of materials and media from his former life to try and discover who he is and thereby coax back his memory.
As a 'plot' it's OK but the problem is this: the artefacts he examines don't spark any definite memory - there is no episode the central character, Yambo, can recollect and associate with them which helps him piece together a retrospective biography...which is how I would expect the book to pan out. Instead, the articles, paintings, images, books and magazines spark very nebulous feelings (the 'mysterious flames') in Yambo and lead him to merely speculate on what form his memories *might* take. The biography being gradually constructed from the stimuli is consequently completely fictitious based on Yambo's best guesses or fancies and therefore pretty meaningless. A staggering number of sentences end in a '?' so there's never any closure for the reader...you never feel you're getting anywhere.
Maybe that's Eco's point. Maybe we're supposed to feel like Yambo - stumbling around in the dark, making nothing more than educated speculations. Maybe the journey of discovery and hypothesis is what's important - like Scrooge's ghost of Christmas Past...Yambo is looking retrospectively and objectively on how he has apparantly lived his life by comparing and cross referring what he wrote or read when he was younger with his own (still intact) semantic memory. For example, he has a very good recollection of Italy's recent history, and he is interested to see, knowing what he knows about fascist Italy's role in WWII, what impact it had on his family as evidenced by his childhood reading habits and diary.
It's as clever and imaginative as any Eco novel, but I personally found it a turgid and unrewarding read.
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