Geoffrey Brock

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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
by Umberto Eco (Harcourt, June 2005)
translated by Geoffrey Brock

2006 Lewis Galantière Award, American Translators Association

Starred reviews in Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist. Named to The San Francisco Chronicle's “Best Books of 2005” list.

“The translation by Geoffrey Brock is truly excellent.” —Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books

“Brock's translation does a wonderful job of capturing the book's simultaneously erudite and comic tone.” —Books in Canada

Read more excerpts from the reviews here.

Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer who lives in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory—he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to the family home somewhere in the hills between Milan and Turin. There, in the sprawling attic, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and adolescent diaries. And so Yambo relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild, and the life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image: that of his first love. A fascinating, abundant new novel—wide-ranging, nostalgic, funny, full of heart—from the incomparable Eco.

Read excerpts from the novel in the New York Times and in The New Yorker.

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