the_lady_lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_lady_lily) wrote2013-11-16 03:18 pm
the_lady_lily) wrote2013-11-16 03:18 pm
Entry tags:
Bibliography
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
This is an illustrated novel, and deserves to be called as such. The plot is really quite interesting - the narrator, Yambo, awakes in hospital after a stroke, unable to remember anything except what he has read. He has lost all fragments of personal memory; instead, he has a collection of cultural memory in his head. He discovers that he has a wife, daughters, grand-children, a thriving antiquarian book business, but cannot connect himself with any memories or facts about them beyond what he is told. He returns to his family's ancestral home in the countryside, where he grew up, in the hope of rediscovering triggers to let him access the buried personal memories and rebuild his life. The text is illustrated with pictures of the things he discovers and that feel familiar, and we accompany Yambo through the process first of reconstituting the cultural situation in which he grew up, and them in puzzling through the narrative that connects the seemingly random personal artefacts (like old school essays) and the discrepancies between them.
It's a rather marvellous piece of writing, very accessible. One gets the sense one would not have liked the pre-stroke Yambo, but the innocence and the random associations of the post-stroke Yambo are endearing in a child-like way. I also enjoyed the way that the structure let Eco make all sorts of interesting comments on cultural memory, how we constitute and articulate what is and isn't important, how individuals manipulate and circumvent state-created truth and so on. Very much in line with some of the stuff I'm thinking about at the moment in terms of Latin literature (and so,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iris4700 and other Roman cultural memory people, if you haven't read this, you should). It's also rather less dense and inaccessible than some of the other things I've read by Eco, so I have no hesitation about recommending it to a broad readership.
Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Oh, I loved this. It was very cheeky. Laura Willowes is a young woman born into a very Traditional family who becomes her father's companion when her mother dies; she never marries, and when her father dies in turn, she goes to live with her brother, his wife and their children. And spends the next twenty years being Aunt Lolly, so terribly dependable but also so very helpless and weak.
Until the moment she suddenly decides that she is going to go and live in Great Mop, a small village in the Chilterns. To her family's absolute surprise, she goes off and does it... and discovers that actually, what she has been wanting to do all her life (rather than be good old Aunt Lolly) is to be a witch.
In terms if a 1926 critique of the limited spheres of acceptable activity for single women, this is a bit of a blinder. I particularly loved the scene where Laura's brother tries to explain to her that she can't have her inheritance because he's foolishly put it into some funds that have crashed, and she sees right through his 'oh, but I know best because I am a MAN'. There was a moment when Laura realises she is a witch when I wondered whether we were going to go into a Charlotte Gilman-Perkins Yellow Wallpaper style hallucinatory place (i.e. she believes she is a witch but is actually experiencing full-on delusions), but no, the author provides plenty of corroborating people who are not being unreliably narrated to say yes, this is a thing. Which, as an alternative to being an old maid, one can rather understand. Lovely social critique, beautifully written, and worth picking up.
This is an illustrated novel, and deserves to be called as such. The plot is really quite interesting - the narrator, Yambo, awakes in hospital after a stroke, unable to remember anything except what he has read. He has lost all fragments of personal memory; instead, he has a collection of cultural memory in his head. He discovers that he has a wife, daughters, grand-children, a thriving antiquarian book business, but cannot connect himself with any memories or facts about them beyond what he is told. He returns to his family's ancestral home in the countryside, where he grew up, in the hope of rediscovering triggers to let him access the buried personal memories and rebuild his life. The text is illustrated with pictures of the things he discovers and that feel familiar, and we accompany Yambo through the process first of reconstituting the cultural situation in which he grew up, and them in puzzling through the narrative that connects the seemingly random personal artefacts (like old school essays) and the discrepancies between them.
It's a rather marvellous piece of writing, very accessible. One gets the sense one would not have liked the pre-stroke Yambo, but the innocence and the random associations of the post-stroke Yambo are endearing in a child-like way. I also enjoyed the way that the structure let Eco make all sorts of interesting comments on cultural memory, how we constitute and articulate what is and isn't important, how individuals manipulate and circumvent state-created truth and so on. Very much in line with some of the stuff I'm thinking about at the moment in terms of Latin literature (and so,
iris4700 and other Roman cultural memory people, if you haven't read this, you should). It's also rather less dense and inaccessible than some of the other things I've read by Eco, so I have no hesitation about recommending it to a broad readership.Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Oh, I loved this. It was very cheeky. Laura Willowes is a young woman born into a very Traditional family who becomes her father's companion when her mother dies; she never marries, and when her father dies in turn, she goes to live with her brother, his wife and their children. And spends the next twenty years being Aunt Lolly, so terribly dependable but also so very helpless and weak.
Until the moment she suddenly decides that she is going to go and live in Great Mop, a small village in the Chilterns. To her family's absolute surprise, she goes off and does it... and discovers that actually, what she has been wanting to do all her life (rather than be good old Aunt Lolly) is to be a witch.
In terms if a 1926 critique of the limited spheres of acceptable activity for single women, this is a bit of a blinder. I particularly loved the scene where Laura's brother tries to explain to her that she can't have her inheritance because he's foolishly put it into some funds that have crashed, and she sees right through his 'oh, but I know best because I am a MAN'. There was a moment when Laura realises she is a witch when I wondered whether we were going to go into a Charlotte Gilman-Perkins Yellow Wallpaper style hallucinatory place (i.e. she believes she is a witch but is actually experiencing full-on delusions), but no, the author provides plenty of corroborating people who are not being unreliably narrated to say yes, this is a thing. Which, as an alternative to being an old maid, one can rather understand. Lovely social critique, beautifully written, and worth picking up.
no subject
I think Eco is generally overrated but he has his moments, and your review of Loana inspires me to give it a shot!
no subject
I'd agree that Eco gets a bit puffed up, but I think what makes this such a good book is that he actually steps away from part of his usual conceit. Part of his Thing is usually a terribly intellectually capable character - William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose, for example. When it works, it's great, but when it doesn't, you get alienated by a clever-clogs. Yambo is precisely the opposite - a very intellectually capable man, but without access to any of the stuff that would back up that capability, if that makes sense. It's like Eco is deliberately trying to write against type - it creates a very different sort of novel. I'd be interested to know what you make of it.