Proust in the Pantry (aroost)

Time spent with Umberto Eco entails risks. Such violent opinions surround his work. Is the prose transportive in its glimmering ranks of ideas or is it a posh replication of Kafka's snowy fields of confusion? His latest novel the Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana yearns to achieve in both directions, (though a subtle title was not a priority) a palindrome of intentions that unlike Joyce's efforts at the Epic, is easily read as one wades through minutiae about Italian pop culture, only to be rescued by a singular act, one shoveled under the psychic armaments of amnesia.

Ed might recognize the plot, a newly disabled intellectual decides to spend time in his grandparents' home to undergo a survey of the existential plumbing. The angle of penetration with this tome is that the protagonist has no memory of his life but only of the books he has read. Midway through the text one is weary of the banality of childhood evil and all its minions. Somehow the tendrils of the Fascist media are sensed by the adult reader as subverting its original intent, underscoring the effect it had on the children of the age. It is safe to say, that Eco corrects in mid-flight (though, again, in which direction) and the ending is a remarkable flourish, one that beckons like the trumpet in Foucault's Pendulum.

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