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A Resounding Eco

Umberto Eco looks like a genial mentor, white-bearded and approachable, his comfortable rotundity settled deep in the softest armchair of his Milan living room. Yet the 73-year-old academic and author, condemned to international celebrity by his 1980 debut novel The Name of the Rose, is not without thorns. Today's discourse — ranging from his newest work of fiction, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, to politics, religion and neckties — bristles with sharp observations. Avuncular he may seem, but this famous European intellectual has not mellowed with age.

Age, memory and nostalgia are, however, the central themes of Queen Loana, Eco's fifth novel, just published in English translation. Struck by amnesia, the narrator, an antiquarian book dealer, begins to dig through the paper trail of his early life in an attempt to kick-start his memory. The novel itself is illustrated with images from comics and children's books that may or may not be clues to the narrator's sequestered identity.

For Eco, of course, everything is a potential clue or sign. A professor at the University of Bologna, he continues to develop the field of semiotics, which he helped create in the 1960s and 1970s by studying the ways that people convey information. "Humans communicate with language but also with everything else we do. The books you own, the way you decorate your house, whether you wear a tie or not are all signs of something else," he explains. "That's semiotics in a nutshell."

His earlier novels neatly adapt this philosophy to the thriller format — Rose, for example, is a medieval whodunit set in a monastery, Foucault's Pendulum a conspiracy of sects and secret societies. The new storyline plunges the author into a forensic examination of nostalgia. "By definition, the word nostalgia is the desire to return, to return to childhood or your 20s or 30s," says Eco, adding, "I'm fine where I am. My relationship with the past is one of tenderness and continuous discovery." One beat and he leans back with a laugh, having decided to confess: "O.K.," he says. "I have always been nostalgic for my childhood — it started when I was 14."

Because of this, Queen Loana is strikingly more personal than his earlier work. "I created a character who was different enough from me that I could give the book loads of my own memories and feel like my privacy was still protected. Everyone at 16, for example, has someone they fall in love with, but never tell." Eco pauses, gives a melancholy smile: "Well, in this case, the girl in the book was really mine."

Eco's popular success as a writer derives from his ability to convey complex ideas simply and to let those ideas and his learned — sometimes arcane — references support his plots, rather than weigh them down. Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1988, tells the story of three men in modern Italy whose intellectual games about the Knights Templar catapult them into danger. Along with The Name of the Rose, it helped to spawn an industry of history-infused thrillers — most recently, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Eco is not convinced by Brown's formula: "The whole conspiracy of that plot ... is contained in Foucault's Pendulum. It's all old material that's been covered a thousand times before. Brown was very good at taking trash lying around and turning it into a page turner. But it makes me laugh that people take it seriously."

Still, Eco treats lowbrow cultural phenomena with the same seriousness as higher-flown accomplishments. In one essay, for example, he analyzes the essence of Italian society by observing Mike Bongiorno, a TV game show host; another dissects the design of the 1,000-lire note. He has also described how comic-book hero Flash Gordon imparted American ideals to children growing up in Mussolini's Italy. Everything is grist for his mill. Eco's catholic approach is reflected by the way in which contemporary paintings on the walls of his spacious apartment are interspersed with drawings by his grandson, and the alacrity with which he leaps up to show off his antique-book collection. Unlocking the glass case he pulls out a copy of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a richly illustrated 1499 volume, most often ascribed to a monk, Francesco Colonna, whom Eco describes as "the Joyce of his time."
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