Love & Life in the Age Of Lost Innocence

"I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves." When Umberto Eco wrote these words in "The Name of the Rose" - putting them in the mouth of Adso of Melk, the naive young monk who narrates the novel - he surely did not think that he was writing a manifesto for a new genre of mass-market fiction. But in the quarter-century since Mr. Eco's first novel was published (the English edition appeared in 1983), books that speak of other books have become an unlikely publishing phenomenon. In combining a medieval setting, a thriller plot, and loads of arcane intellectual trivia, Mr. Eco hit on a formula that writers have been exploiting ever since: without "The Name of the Rose," there would be no "The Da Vinci Code," no "The Rule of Four."

Even after 25 years, however, the popularity of "The Name of the Rose" - which has sold more than 10 million copies in 30 languages - remains something of a mystery. Here, after all, is a 500-page novel about a 14th-century monk, full of long debates about nominalism, Franciscan reform movements, and the politics of the Holy Roman Empire. What's more, it is a novel by an academic semiotician - before "The Name of the Rose," Mr. Eco had published many works of literary theory - that is designed as a case study in postmodernism.

But while "postmodern" is not exactly a word publishers like to slap on the front cover in inch-high letters, it is exactly the postmodernism of "The Name of the Rose" that explains its popularity. In a 1985 "Postscript" to the novel, Mr. Eco explained just how a postmodern novel differs from the ordinary variety:

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly,' because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

"The Name of the Rose" is not a love story, but Mr. Eco's principle still holds: It is a novel-in-quotes, constantly acknowledging its own literary antecedents. Mr. Eco's detective-hero, for instance, has mannerisms and investigative techniques borrowed directly from Sherlock Holmes; so Mr. Eco names him "William of Baskerville," after the famous Holmes story "The Hound of the Baskervilles." This is evidently meant to exculpate the character from the charge of being derivative. But what Mr. Eco does not acknowledge is that the exculpation does not make the character any less derivative: William of Baskerville is still null as a fictional creation, without a trace of independent life or consciousness. This is what makes him palatable to readers of genre fiction; Mr. Eco has given them just what they expect, but in quotes.

Mr. Eco is like a man who agrees to play a game of chess, then spends the whole time reminding his opponent that, after all, it is just a game. This is true, of course, but if you lose, you still lose. And when it comes to the deepest pleasures of fiction, there is no doubt that Mr. Eco defaults. We do not read his novels for true insight into human character, for a rich portrait of the way the world works, or for surprising, creative prose. Instead, there is information: huge chunks of it, clumsily stitched into the surrounding plot, usually in the form of a monologue.

The formula that Mr. Eco invented in "The Name of the Rose" has served as the template for each of his subsequent novels, from the cabalistic numerology of "Foucault's Pendulum" to the Grail quest of "Baudolino." But in his new book, "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" (Harcourt, 416 pages, $28), Mr. Eco's subject is much more intimate: not the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, but the 1930s and 1940s, the period of Mr. Eco's own childhood. And the hero of the novel - Giambattista Bodoni, called Yambo - shares many features of his creator's biography.

Like Mr. Eco, Bodoni is born in Italy in the early 1930s, grows up under Fascism, and observes the war and the occupation while still too young to fight. Mr. Eco has spoken in interviews about his childhood devotion to Jules Verne and adventure comics, and about listening to the forbidden Radio London with his socialist grandfather; Yambo has the same memories.

Or, rather, he had the same memories. For when the novel begins, Yambo has just woken up from a coma, suffering from a strange form of amnesia. He can remember all the public and impersonal information he has taken in as an adult, but his private memories, especially those relating to his childhood, have completely vanished. This is surely Mr. Eco's postmodern way of acknowledging the obvious criticism of his work: that it is full of facts and devoid of people. Yambo's quest to regain his individual memories, which forms the only action of the novel, can be read as the author's attempt to reclaim for his fiction the human realities he has heretofore neglected.

"The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" does not quite do this, but it comes closer than Mr. Eco's other books. Its success lies almost entirely in its subject: if "The Name of the Rose" tried to "do" medieval theology, the new novel "does" Italian pop culture of the 1930s, with a comparable thoroughness and lust for detail. As Yambo lounges in his childhood farmhouse, rummaging through his old comic books, pulp novels, and records, Mr. Eco offers a trove of words and images that will evoke nostalgia for Italians, and curiosity for everyone else.

Not content to list his favorite characters from old comics - Pipino, Sandokan, the Queen Loana of the title - Mr. Eco sprinkles the text with borrowed images, creating a pop version of a favorite Sebald technique. He is at his best when remembering the way an Italian child of the time was forced to reconcile the playful, joyous world of the comics with the blood-and-iron propaganda imbibed at school. It is a more extreme form of the duality of every childhood - caught between fantasy and reality, solitude and conformity - and so it resonates far beyond the specific setting of Fascist Italy.

The plot of the book, however, is contrived as usual. Amnesia is such an outworn fictional device that even putting quotes around it doesn't seem to satisfy Mr. Eco, and he allows Yambo to gain and lose memories as the story demands. The emotional center of the novel - Yambo's mystic adoration for the Beatrice of his adolescence, a girl named Lila Saba - suffers from Mr. Eco's usual tendency to substitute baroque exaggeration for actual intensity: "a creature of eighteen, diaphanously white, her flesh animated by a light rosy hue, the skin around her eyes imbued with a faint aquamarine cast, through which can be glimpsed, upon her forehead and at her temples, tiny veins of the palest blue," and so on. Even so, "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" has more charm and appeal than most of Mr. Eco's work - if only because it recreates a world that the author really knew, and that the reader cannot find in any other book.