More Queen Loana reviews
From Literary Wiki.org
Times Online: it never becomes more than the sum of its parts.
The Telegraph - The Da Vinci Code is one of the few novels to have sold more than The Name of the Rose, I point out. Must be quite galling, that. He shrugs. Has he read it? 'Yes.' Did he like it? He shrugs again. 'It's a page-turner.'
The Independent: ‘‘" I can judge Fascism historically for what it was. But it was my childhood. So often with some friends, all left-oriented people, after a party, we would all sing some of the Fascist songs."‘‘
San Francisco Chronicle: ‘‘the great shame of Eco's novel is that it's not just a straight memoir.’‘
Miami Herald: ‘‘It is not a university exam, Eco insisted. ``No one can identify all the quotes. I made such a collage of quotes that even I no longer recognize them.‘‘ and **’‘Queen Loana will be his last novel.’‘**
South Florida Sun Sentinal: ‘‘The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana began as a nonfiction project. In recent years Eco had been thinking of departing from novelistic success with a memoir of his childhood during the Italian fascist period of the 1930s and 1940s. When a colleague beat him to it, he was left mulling what to do with the nostalgic material he had accumulated.’‘
Harcourt interviews Eco: ‘‘"I am a scholar who during the weekends writes novels instead of playing golf."‘‘
Guardian: ‘‘he characters, not surprisingly perhaps, fail to thrive in the long shadows cast by all the books that Eco/Yambo picks up and discusses, and they seem pale and uninteresting in comparison to the many beautiful illustrations from Yambo's favourite childhood books’‘
Scotsman: ‘‘Umberto Eco is the dirty poster boy for libraries: for the perverse, erotic, funny and dangerous possibilities of sitting down and reading.’‘
Kansas City Star -- A positive review/interview that seems confused about the definition of "graphic novel."
Detroit News: ‘‘Eco viewed the project as the inverse of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," in which memory propels the narrative. "The very fact that I couldn't, like Proust, return to my personal memory" laid the groundwork. "That the character has to deal only with the objective memories makes his a reconstruction that is collective and generational."‘‘
New York Sun: ‘‘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.... The plot of the book, however, is contrived as usual.’‘
New York Times: ‘‘The book's appeal sometimes sags under the weight of its whimsy and the unavoidable pedantries of nostalgia,’‘
Christian Science Monitor: ‘‘bookworms will get an added kick out of puzzling out the dozens of literary allusions.’‘
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