Sam Leith
A Life in the Library
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
By Umberto Eco (Translated by Geoffrey Block)
Secker & Warburg 456pp £17.99
Imagine you were to wake up smothered in thick fog. Imagine you were to wake up in a coma. Imagine you were to wake up in an Umberto Eco novel. Such are the bafflements and misfortunes suffered by the narrator and protagonist of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. The book opens with two lines of unattributed dialogue:
‘And what's your name?’
‘Wait, it's on the tip of my tongue.’
The questions are not at all irrelevant. Giambattista Bodoni, an antiquarian book-dealer about to enter his sixtieth year, has woken up in a hospital in 1991, unaware that he is an antiquarian book-dealer, that his name is Giambattista Bodoni, that he is fifty-nine, or that it is 1991. He doesn't
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner