The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I’m currently reading Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This isn’t going to be a book review – I haven’t even got that far into it yet – but it’s got me thinking. Or rather, remembering.

The protagonist awakes in hospital to find that his implicit memory and semantic memory are intact, but he has complete amnesia when it comes to his episodic memory. He can therefore remember how to drive a car, but not whether he owns a car to drive. He can quote long passages of literature and tell people when Napoleon was born, but doesn’t remember his own date of birth.

But I’m going off on a tangent. The exact details of his amnesia aren’t that relevant. What is relevant is that he returns to his childhood home in a quest to ‘jog his memory’. Thus far into the book, this has not happened. Isolated memories do suddenly pop into his head, but often only in the form of a sentence that leads him nowhere: ‘The procession is set to begin, Captain Potato says when.’

The book is set in Italy and the protagonist lives in Milan. I’m half Italian with a Milanese family as far back as can be remembered. All connection to that heritage was suddenly severed with the death of my father over twenty years ago. Before that we had an active life in the Anglo-Italian community in London and would travel to Italy every summer. Sometimes to Milan, but more usually to a beach resort. (There is a great exodus from Milan to the countryside in the summer, just as there is from Helsinki.)

I began to wonder what I remembered of those nine years of Italy and being Italian. Not much. Certain incidents have obviously stuck in my head because of their unpleasant nature, but why the others? They are sometimes no more than a feeling, an odd sentence that takes me nowhere.

Over the next few weeks, I shall be gathering these little flames of Italy together in a serious of posts to see where they might lead.