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
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
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553