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 order from our bookshop
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
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