Summary: Having suffered a complete loss of memory regarding every aspect of his identity, Yambo withdraws to a family home outside of Milan, where he sorts through boxes of old records and experiences memories in the form of a graphic novel. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Eco, best known for the popular medieval murder-mystery tale The Name of the Rose (1983), continually tests himself and his devoted readers by composing, one after another, deeply cerebral novels teeming with erudition and offering plotlines into which he weaves (almost pours) learned discussions of history, religion, and philosophy. What saves his fiction from aridity and pretension, however, is his compelling storytelling and greatly sympathetic characters. His new novel, demonstrating this combination of traits to the fullest, is about a middle-aged man, an Italian rare-book dealer, who falls into a state of amnesia and must attempt to recover his memory. In other words, he seeks to relearn who "I" is. Yambo--the man's nickname--spends several weeks in his old family home in a rural village, sorting through the accumulated artifacts of recent family history and his own childhood. Surely these comic books and illustrated children's weeklies will prove to be a successful therapy; he desperately hopes they will prompt his memory. 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of a thriller as Yambo pieces his past together, and on a more metaphysical level, it addresses provocative and never outdated or irrelevant questions about the integrity of one's identity and the irresistible attempt to estimate, while still a part of the community of the living, one's lasting imprint on the global slate. ((Reviewed March 1, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.
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