Subject
Fwd: Nabokov, whose memoir "Speak,
Memory," begins with equating life ...
Memory," begins with equating life ...
From
Date
Body
EDNOTE. I have enjoyed several of Eco's books but always wondered if his style
in Italian is as playful as his content. Can any Italian subscriber comment on
this--especially vis-avis VN.
---------------------------------
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 07:35:28 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Nabokov, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with equating life ...
------------------ [1] [2]
http://www.detnews.com/2005/books/0506/22/ent-223315.htm[3]
Eco's latest work links memory and soul
DetNews.com, MI - 5 hours ago
... Like VLADIMIR NABOKOV, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with
equating life as a candle flicker between two abysses of darkness,
Eco writes in his new novel ...
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Eco's latest work links memory and soul
By Scott Martelle / Los Angeles Times
Comment on this story[4]
Send this story to a friend[5]
Get Home Delivery[6]
NEW YORK -- Umberto Eco settles into a couch in the second-floor den
of midtown Manhattan's Morgans Hotel and pulls the stub of an unlit
cigar from his mouth. After smoking for most of his adult life, he
began cutting back about six months ago yet can't quite leave the
habit of touch behind. He's not even sure he wants to leave smoking
behind, having read somewhere that those with Alzheimer's are
disproportionately nonsmokers, suggesting nicotine as a guarantor of
memory. And memory, Eco believes, defines the human soul.
Stop smoking, he jokes, and risk losing yourself.
"If there is something that we call soul, that's memory -- it makes
up your identity," Eco, 73, says, his voice twisted by a thick
Italian accent and interrupted by quick, explosive chortles. "All
your befores, all your afters -- without memory you are an animal.
You have no human soul. Even for a believer, you cannot go to hell
without memory. Why to suffer so much if you don't know why you
suffer? It doesn't make sense. If, in time, you lose your memory,
there's no meaning in paradise and no meaning in hell."
Memory lies at the heart of Eco's new novel, "The Mysterious Flame
of Queen Loana," which recently brought him from his Milan, Italy,
home to New York for the start of a book tour.
In the novel, Eco explores the nature of a life separated from its
context. Antiquarian book dealer Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni suffers
a stroke and awakens from the fog of a coma to discover he has lost
the part of his memory that holds personal experiences. He has no
idea who he is; his wife and two daughters are strangers, and the
route from the hospital to his own house is a tourist's adventurous
trek.
He recalls quotations from books -- he initially tells his doctor he
is Arthur Gordon Pym, an Edgar Allan Poe character -- but can't
discern which women he encounters are lovers from what his wife
assures him was a licentious past.
Yambo's wife, a psychologist, suggests he return to his childhood
home, an estate in a rural village in northwest Italy, and use the
archives of his youth to re-establish himself. So begins a
reconstruction that cannot work because Yambo is now building a life
from the outside rather than living it from the inside; it's like the
difference between observing life and experiencing it.
Still, memories revive and the strain of encountering a past he had
repressed -- a youthful moral test during World War II -- bring him
both to revelation and a renewed darkness that might or might not be
death.
In the process, Eco slowly builds a fictional biography not of a
character but of a generation, and illustrates it with youthful
literary touchstones from the 1930s -- Flash Gordon and Ming the
Merciless, Queen Loana and Mandrake the Magician, the Phantom and
Mickey Mouse. Disney's "Mickey Mouse Runs His Own Newspaper" slipped
past the Italian Fascist censors, and Mickey's pronouncements about
the freedom of the press alerted the young Yambo (and Eco) that the
written word had more potential than simple propaganda.
"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is Eco's fifth novel, and like
the others it comprises both traditional narrative storytelling and
inventive discourses on arcane subjects while drawing on philosophy,
history and literature.
The approach was cast in Eco's 1983 debut, "The Name of the Rose,"
in which he used a murder mystery to explore the medieval Roman
Catholic Church. The Middle Ages also gave rise to "Foucault's
Pendulum," in which contemporary characters uncover centuries-old
plots by the Knights Templar, and to "Baudolino," about the days of
Barbarossa, who fought the papacy in central Europe in the 12th
century.
Eco advanced to the 1600s for "The Island of the Day Before," which
imagined the race among navigators to establish longitude, and thus
measure distance and time, which would give the discovering country
an advantage in the battle to build colonial empires.
In the new novel, the research was personal -- Eco spent World War
II in a village near Turin, Italy. "They were not dropping bombs, but
the partisan war was going on so we got to avoid the bullets going
around us, not from above," Eco says.
Eco dipped into his own reassembled library of children's books,
antiquarian volumes and Fascist propaganda for the mementos included
in the book.
"All during my adult life, every time I could in a flea market I
re-set up my original library," Eco says. "Through the Internet, I
succeeded in reconstructing my stamp collection of 1943. More or less
I have found exactly the same stamps I had in my collection. ... I
have spent all my adult years continuously going back to my childhood
. ... I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval
of childhood."
Other elements of the novel, he says, were borrowed from the lives
of friends, including a crucial and harrowing story line about
Yambo's involvement in an encounter between German soldiers and
Italian partisans.
"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" began with a flameout. Eco had
contemplated writing an autobiography about growing up in Mussolini's
Italy but found five years ago that a friend had beaten him to the
punch. "I said, 'I hate you! You have stopped me, I can't do the
same,' " Eco says a few days after the hotel interview, speaking to a
packed house at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y.
An encounter with another friend, though, jump-started the idea when
the concept of memory came up in the conversation.
"I started to muse, that could be the start -- a man who loses his
memory," Eco says. "Not an autobiography but an objective biography
of somebody else, and maybe of a generation."
Eco viewed the project as the inverse of Marcel Proust's
"Remembrance of Things Past," in which memory propels the narrative.
"The very fact that I couldn't, like Proust, return to my personal
memory" laid the groundwork. "That the character has to deal only
with the objective memories makes his a reconstruction that is
collective and generational."
Eco's physique has the soft roundness of a life well lived, his eyes
sharp behind large-frame glasses. He is known primarily as a novelist
and freely spices his conversation with literary references. But he
is also a highly regarded and widely published expert on semiotics,
the study of symbols and signs, which he teaches at Italy's
University of Bologna.
Eco hopes the universality of memory, and curiosity about other
cultures, might give the book a boost in the United States.
"Through the book, foreign readers discover the story of another
country," Eco says. "After all, we had never been to Macondo but when
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote '100 Years of Solitude,' we learned
something about Macondo."
Yet the sense of nostalgia for lost childhood, lost innocence, may
prove more significant.
Like Vladimir Nabokov, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with
equating life as a candle flicker between two abysses of darkness,
Eco writes in his new novel of life as a song. Without memory, the
notes follow no path, each existing in its own moment, and the song
is no longer a song. And without memory, each moment of life just a
free-floating note.
"Literature, like philosophy, is always a meditation on death," Eco
says. "Otherwise, why to write?"
Links:
------
[1] http://www.detnews.com/index.htm
[2] http://www.detnews.com/
[3] http://www.detnews.com/index.htm
[4] javascript:comments(letteradress)
[5] javascript:shareit()
[6]
https://secure.detroitnewspapers.com/circ/cgi-bin/delivery.plx?selectedpaper=detnews
----- End forwarded message -----
in Italian is as playful as his content. Can any Italian subscriber comment on
this--especially vis-avis VN.
---------------------------------
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 07:35:28 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Nabokov, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with equating life ...
------------------ [1] [2]
http://www.detnews.com/2005/books/0506/22/ent-223315.htm[3]
Eco's latest work links memory and soul
DetNews.com, MI - 5 hours ago
... Like VLADIMIR NABOKOV, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with
equating life as a candle flicker between two abysses of darkness,
Eco writes in his new novel ...
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Eco's latest work links memory and soul
By Scott Martelle / Los Angeles Times
Comment on this story[4]
Send this story to a friend[5]
Get Home Delivery[6]
NEW YORK -- Umberto Eco settles into a couch in the second-floor den
of midtown Manhattan's Morgans Hotel and pulls the stub of an unlit
cigar from his mouth. After smoking for most of his adult life, he
began cutting back about six months ago yet can't quite leave the
habit of touch behind. He's not even sure he wants to leave smoking
behind, having read somewhere that those with Alzheimer's are
disproportionately nonsmokers, suggesting nicotine as a guarantor of
memory. And memory, Eco believes, defines the human soul.
Stop smoking, he jokes, and risk losing yourself.
"If there is something that we call soul, that's memory -- it makes
up your identity," Eco, 73, says, his voice twisted by a thick
Italian accent and interrupted by quick, explosive chortles. "All
your befores, all your afters -- without memory you are an animal.
You have no human soul. Even for a believer, you cannot go to hell
without memory. Why to suffer so much if you don't know why you
suffer? It doesn't make sense. If, in time, you lose your memory,
there's no meaning in paradise and no meaning in hell."
Memory lies at the heart of Eco's new novel, "The Mysterious Flame
of Queen Loana," which recently brought him from his Milan, Italy,
home to New York for the start of a book tour.
In the novel, Eco explores the nature of a life separated from its
context. Antiquarian book dealer Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni suffers
a stroke and awakens from the fog of a coma to discover he has lost
the part of his memory that holds personal experiences. He has no
idea who he is; his wife and two daughters are strangers, and the
route from the hospital to his own house is a tourist's adventurous
trek.
He recalls quotations from books -- he initially tells his doctor he
is Arthur Gordon Pym, an Edgar Allan Poe character -- but can't
discern which women he encounters are lovers from what his wife
assures him was a licentious past.
Yambo's wife, a psychologist, suggests he return to his childhood
home, an estate in a rural village in northwest Italy, and use the
archives of his youth to re-establish himself. So begins a
reconstruction that cannot work because Yambo is now building a life
from the outside rather than living it from the inside; it's like the
difference between observing life and experiencing it.
Still, memories revive and the strain of encountering a past he had
repressed -- a youthful moral test during World War II -- bring him
both to revelation and a renewed darkness that might or might not be
death.
In the process, Eco slowly builds a fictional biography not of a
character but of a generation, and illustrates it with youthful
literary touchstones from the 1930s -- Flash Gordon and Ming the
Merciless, Queen Loana and Mandrake the Magician, the Phantom and
Mickey Mouse. Disney's "Mickey Mouse Runs His Own Newspaper" slipped
past the Italian Fascist censors, and Mickey's pronouncements about
the freedom of the press alerted the young Yambo (and Eco) that the
written word had more potential than simple propaganda.
"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is Eco's fifth novel, and like
the others it comprises both traditional narrative storytelling and
inventive discourses on arcane subjects while drawing on philosophy,
history and literature.
The approach was cast in Eco's 1983 debut, "The Name of the Rose,"
in which he used a murder mystery to explore the medieval Roman
Catholic Church. The Middle Ages also gave rise to "Foucault's
Pendulum," in which contemporary characters uncover centuries-old
plots by the Knights Templar, and to "Baudolino," about the days of
Barbarossa, who fought the papacy in central Europe in the 12th
century.
Eco advanced to the 1600s for "The Island of the Day Before," which
imagined the race among navigators to establish longitude, and thus
measure distance and time, which would give the discovering country
an advantage in the battle to build colonial empires.
In the new novel, the research was personal -- Eco spent World War
II in a village near Turin, Italy. "They were not dropping bombs, but
the partisan war was going on so we got to avoid the bullets going
around us, not from above," Eco says.
Eco dipped into his own reassembled library of children's books,
antiquarian volumes and Fascist propaganda for the mementos included
in the book.
"All during my adult life, every time I could in a flea market I
re-set up my original library," Eco says. "Through the Internet, I
succeeded in reconstructing my stamp collection of 1943. More or less
I have found exactly the same stamps I had in my collection. ... I
have spent all my adult years continuously going back to my childhood
. ... I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval
of childhood."
Other elements of the novel, he says, were borrowed from the lives
of friends, including a crucial and harrowing story line about
Yambo's involvement in an encounter between German soldiers and
Italian partisans.
"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" began with a flameout. Eco had
contemplated writing an autobiography about growing up in Mussolini's
Italy but found five years ago that a friend had beaten him to the
punch. "I said, 'I hate you! You have stopped me, I can't do the
same,' " Eco says a few days after the hotel interview, speaking to a
packed house at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y.
An encounter with another friend, though, jump-started the idea when
the concept of memory came up in the conversation.
"I started to muse, that could be the start -- a man who loses his
memory," Eco says. "Not an autobiography but an objective biography
of somebody else, and maybe of a generation."
Eco viewed the project as the inverse of Marcel Proust's
"Remembrance of Things Past," in which memory propels the narrative.
"The very fact that I couldn't, like Proust, return to my personal
memory" laid the groundwork. "That the character has to deal only
with the objective memories makes his a reconstruction that is
collective and generational."
Eco's physique has the soft roundness of a life well lived, his eyes
sharp behind large-frame glasses. He is known primarily as a novelist
and freely spices his conversation with literary references. But he
is also a highly regarded and widely published expert on semiotics,
the study of symbols and signs, which he teaches at Italy's
University of Bologna.
Eco hopes the universality of memory, and curiosity about other
cultures, might give the book a boost in the United States.
"Through the book, foreign readers discover the story of another
country," Eco says. "After all, we had never been to Macondo but when
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote '100 Years of Solitude,' we learned
something about Macondo."
Yet the sense of nostalgia for lost childhood, lost innocence, may
prove more significant.
Like Vladimir Nabokov, whose memoir "Speak, Memory," begins with
equating life as a candle flicker between two abysses of darkness,
Eco writes in his new novel of life as a song. Without memory, the
notes follow no path, each existing in its own moment, and the song
is no longer a song. And without memory, each moment of life just a
free-floating note.
"Literature, like philosophy, is always a meditation on death," Eco
says. "Otherwise, why to write?"
Links:
------
[1] http://www.detnews.com/index.htm
[2] http://www.detnews.com/
[3] http://www.detnews.com/index.htm
[4] javascript:comments(letteradress)
[5] javascript:shareit()
[6]
https://secure.detroitnewspapers.com/circ/cgi-bin/delivery.plx?selectedpaper=detnews
----- End forwarded message -----