Volume 52, Number 10 · June 9, 2005
Looking Forward to the Past
By Tim Parks
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
Harcourt, 469 pp., $27.00
Milan, 1991. A man wakes up after an accident yet feels he is 'still suspended in a milky gray'—a grayness he seeks to evoke by quoting a dozen or so literary descriptions of fog. Finally aware that he is in a hospital bed, the man is able to answer a number of questions posed to him by a doctor in order to check whether his mind is working. He cites the Pythagorean theorem, mentions Euclid's elements, quotes spontaneously from Moby-Dick and The Waste Land, but cannot remember his own name. The doctor explains that while retaining his 'semantic memory,' everything, that is, learned in the form of publicly available factual knowledge, he has lost his private or personal memory. He doesn't know whether he is married or not, has no recollection of his parents or of the various episodes of his life, no recall of the thousand small personal activities in which one engages every day: brushing teeth, driving a car, getting dressed.
Review, 3604 words
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