Geoffrey Brock

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Comments on The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

See complete reviews in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Books in Canada, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Globe and Mail, Greater Kashmir, The Guardian, The Observer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The St. Petersburg Times.

On the translation:

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

“A fine translation.” —Robert Alter, Slate

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

“Eco takes such evident pleasure in the creative process that it’s hard not to be caught up in his excitement and to marvel at the ease and lightness of his prose (or at least that of the translation from the Italian, by Geoffrey Brock).” —Shelf-Conscious

“Brock...seems on top of the problems of allusion and multilingualism the text throws up and his version is attractively light for all that.” —The Age (Australia)

“One must take one’s hat off to Geoffrey Brock (who himself is a poet) for maintaining fidelity to the content of the book and keeping it as poetic as Umberto Eco must have penned it in his mother tongue. It is savvy translators like Brock that have kept the entire world in touch with modern greats like Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino and Gunter Grass.” —Greater Kashmir (India)

“Brilliant writing—with much credit to Eco's new translator Geoffrey Brock—and wonderful illustrations.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is a special pleasure thanks in part to Geoffrey Brock's supple translation.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

On the book:

“A head-spinning tour through the corridors of history and popular culture, and one of this sly entertainer’s liveliest yet.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Utterly, eye-poppingly fascinating.” —The Guardian (UK)

“Eco recreates an incredible sense of the period. It made me nostalgic for experiences I have never had.... The bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum has struck gold once again.” —The Globe and Mail (Canada)

“The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana provides further evidence that Eco continues to write some of the most timeless and consistently engaging fiction out there.” —The Miami Herald

“A profound study of the influences that shape and determine a life. For all its vivid cartoons, this is a novel about fog, with a dark vision. What begins with the most advanced science of the mind ends with deliberate echoes of Calderón de la Barca's questions about dreams and reality, and confirms Eco as an outstanding writer of philosophy dressed as fiction.” —The Observer (UK)

“The book is brilliantly written and gorgeously illustrated with depictions of the visual world of Yambo's childhood.... It is a satisfying and intriguing read.” —The Chicago Sun-Times

“An affecting book that makes the personal cultural and vice versa. The many rich and specific details must have special resonance for Italians, but American readers won't feel daunted; the entertaining narrative fairly rips by. Another winner from Eco.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“The material that Yambo/Eco wades through is fascinating. The book’s many illustrations showing old comic strips, magazine advertisements, newspaper headlines, etc., are a pleasure for the reader, likewise the inventive rhyming translations of so many Italian songs of the period....” —New York Review of Books

“In addition to telling an extraordinary story in a delightfully ornamented manner, Eco's novel is illustrated as well.... In a word, this novel is fun.” —The St. Petersburg Times

“The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana can be read as a love letter to literature, a layered excavation of an Italian boyhood of the 1940s, and a sly meditation on human consciousness. Both playful and reverent, it stands with The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before as among Eco's most successful novels.” —Amazon.com Editorial Review

“The novel’s literal level almost sports the pacing of a thriller as Yambo pieces his past together, and on a more metaphysical level, it addresses provocative and never outdated or irrelevant questions about the integrity of one's identity.” —Booklist (starred review)

“It’s an absorbing exploration of how that most fundamental master-narrative, our memory, is pieced together from a bricolage of pop culture.” —Publishers Weekly

“In his warm, challenging, dizzying and ultimately rewarding new novel, Eco violates Aldous Huxley's maxim that 'every man's memory is his private literature.' Instead, this latest novel demonstrates the power of literature to constitute memory and, with it, the soul.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“As always with Eco, there is much to admire in his all-consuming intelligence. There is even an emotional vulnerability that makes the novel far more engaging than much of his fiction.” —The Sunday Times (UK)

“Just when you've decided the book is a beautiful, pointless trip down someone else's memory lane, Eco throws in a sad love story and a haunting World War II adventure, and you realize that the strange journey was well worth taking after all.” —Entertainment Weekly

“The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is impressive in the sheer breadth of knowledge intertwined to form a national consciousness, and the tale it tells is engaging.” —The Christian Science Monitor

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