Wherein Umberto Eco meets me where I am
Two years ago, around this same time of year, I read Baudolino. The novel follows the life of a man quick with languages and averse to war. He works for the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, with whom he shares a father-son relationship. Baudolino's life's goal is to make as many people look good (especially the one's he loves) with minimal loss of life. This takes him on journeys to far places of questionable reality and leads him on a life of questionable verity. At the time I read it, I was embarking on a semester's study of medieval Latin, music, culture, and history. I salivated over the hodge-podge of languages and worlds. The novel brought to life the far away places and times I slaved over in my medieval Latin textbook.
I'm now reading The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. It is about a man who has had an accident and lost most of his memory, except for what he read in books. He is an old book dealer. His world is mediated through excerpts of things he has read, and he talks about the books as if they are characters in his life's story. A large component of my thesis is book history. I am familiar with jargon, the establishments, the markets. And I wouldn't have been a short time ago. But once again, Umberto Eco has found me where I am, casting flesh on the dry academics of it all.
And he writes so deliciously that it makes me once again love words:
If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pulverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artifical canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna.I had thought cellars symbolized the welcome of the mother's womb, with their amniotic dampness, but this aerial womb made up for that with an almost medicinal heat. And in that luminous maze, where if you pushed aside a couple of roof tiles you would see that open sky, a complicit mustiness hung in the air, the odor of silence and calm.
Pulverulent?* I love this guy! (okay, I know it's a translation, but still.)
He forces me to be a better reader.
Also, in this book, he talks a lot about fog. The literal natural phenomenon and the fog of the mind. I find it strangely comforting.
*Pulverulent=consisting of fine particles; powdery or crumbly. E.g. My kitchen floor is pulverulent with the carcasses of deceased goldfish crackers.