| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
Book Reviews |
August 2005 |
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,
An Illustrated Novel by Umberto Echo,
Harcourt Inc., 469 pages, hardcover, $36.95, ISBN 0-15-101140-0
Baudolino
by Umberto Eco, Harcourt, Inc., 522 pages, hardcover, $40.00
By Alidė Kohlhaas
Umberto Eco's latest book, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, has moved away from his usual medieval themes to the present and the more recent past of Italy from the mid-1920s to the end of the Second World War. The book's protagonist is Giambattista Bondini, a book antiquarian, who was born in December, 1931. He is not quite 60 years old as the story of this latest Eco novel opens. Bondini is coming out of a coma. He has lost his memory; he knows neither who he is or was, but when told his name, can instantly recall that his namesake was a famous 18th century typographer.
It is soon apparent that the only things he knows is the content of his beloved books. He can quote from them with ease, but he is unable to recognize his wife, Paola, and their children and grandchildren. All of the memory connected with his emotional life appears to have vanished.
When asked by his doctor if he knows what year it is, he tells him he is sure that it is after the discovery of America. "You don't remember a date, any date before . . . your reawakening?"
"Any date? Nineteen hundred and forty-five, end of World War Two," is Bondini's reply. Actually, Eco sets the date for the start of this new novel as April 25, 1991. It, as the doctor says, can be called the Day of Liberation. Might this not only be Bondini's liberation from the coma, but also be an allusion to the date Benito Mussolini, known as Il Duce, fled towards Switzerland, his subsequent capture, . . .
January 2003
Baudolino. . .
A story imaginatively woven
By Alidė Kohlhaas
Throughout the ages wondrous tales have been spun by known and unknown storytellers. Some might call them lies, others myths, and some might call them enchanting or gruesome entertainment. A mixture of truth and imagination is contained in all of the best stories ever told. Aesop used animals in his fables to tell us the truth about human nature. Fairytales were meant to teach lessons to young and old alike. Myths often involve real historical characters around whom fabulous stories has been woven to enhance or diminish the character. The novel is a modern development out of the ancient art of storytelling, and one of the best novelists in our own age is Umberto Eco.
The Italian novelist and professor of semiotics first caught the world’s attention with his The Name of the Rose, in which he visited the 14th century. He now has given us Baudolino. In this new work he goes a little further back in history than in his first book of many years ago. Baudolino, named for its main character, starts at the very beginning of the 13th century, in 1204, and from there works backward to the mid-1100s.
Baudolino is a most engrossing central figure, whose story encompasses his life from about age 12 in 1155 to 1204 when he arrives in the Byzantine capital. It is April and Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) is under invasion by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Baudolino has just saved Niketas Choniates, a historian and former court orator, judge and chancellor of the basileus of Byzantium, from certain death . . .
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A book that also deals with the period of the First Crusade is
Pilgermann
by Russell Hoban
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