Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana : An Illustrated Novel羅安娜女王的神秘火焰

Yambo, a sixty-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic' (Yambo remembers all about Julius Caesar and can recite every poem he has ever read), but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't recognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood. His wife, who is at his side as he slowly begins to recover, convinces him to return to his family home in the hills somewhere between Milan and Turin. Yambo promptly retreats to the sprawling attic, cluttered with boxes of newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and adolescent diaries. There, he relives the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Cyrano de Bergerac. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost.But a relapse occurs. Now in a coma, his memories run wild, and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to find at last the face of the girl he loves: she descends the stairs of their high school and morphs into a Dante-esque promise (or threat) of the afterlife, as he struggles harder to capture her simple, innocent, real-life image - the schoolgirl he never forgot. Copiously illustrated throughout with images from comics, book jackets, record sleeves and other printed ephemera, "The Mysterious Flame" is a fascinating and hugely entertaining new novel from the incomparable Umberto

穿梭在記憶的迷霧中，
我摸索、我追尋、我迷失了方向......
唯有心中的那把神秘火焰，
才能引領我邁向生命最終的出口......

古書商亞姆柏發生意外後醒來，卻失去了記憶，生命中所曾經歷過的一切，都變成了一片空白。妻子建議他回到小時候成長的鄉下大宅，在那裡慢慢找回記憶。

亞姆柏的祖父也是古書商，大宅裡除了無可數計的書籍、漫畫、報章雜誌及唱片，還有亞姆柏求學時期的筆記。藉由這些文本與音樂，他逐漸在記憶的缺口裡重新拼湊出片段的人生。

有一次，亞姆柏在無意間找到了一套《羅安娜女王的神秘火焰》的漫畫，裡面的內容曾讓年少時的他悸動不已。而彷彿是羅安娜女王的指引，亞姆柏想起了年輕時曾經暗戀的一個女孩──莉拉，更發現自己終其一生，其實在追尋的就是莉拉的臉！只是，對於一個已經活在時間之外的人來說，尋找莉拉的線索又在哪裡？......

全球無數書迷引頸期盼，《玫瑰的名字》文壇大師艾可在睽違四年之後，終於推出他的第五部長篇小說巨作！艾可以過人的才華、淵博的智識，透過主角對生命過往的追溯與探尋，帶領讀者一起穿越時空，暢遊文學、音樂、藝術與歷史，不但重現了大師的成長歷程和內心世界，更是大師對甘美與苦澀兼具的青春歲月的禮讚！