| Description | THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME has two acts. Each act revolves around a stroke. The first stroke - the opening - takes away the protagonist's lived memory. In other words, Yambo (as he's known) has amnesia, cannot remember his name, wife, children or how fast cars move, but he can remember everything he has ever read - the vast library of a voracious reader. The first half of the book takes the form of an investigation: what has Yambo's life been over the last sixty years? After wandering around Milan somewhat helplessly - running into former mistresses whom he doesn't recognize, trying to establish whether he loved or merely admired from afar his beautiful young assistant - Yambo retreats to his childhood summer home, Solara, in the Piemonte mountains. There he takes to the attic, where he goes through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records and albums, effectively trying to build a memory from scratch through the artefacts of his distant childhood. Then he finds the book of a lifetime - the book of a rare-book-dealer's lifetime - a 1642 folio edition of Shakespeare. Then he has another stroke - and all his memory returns, vivid and unconstrained by chronology. But he is in a coma, where he will remain for the second half of the book. In this coma, Yambo is delighted to discover that he can remember at will. His new goal: to remember the face of the girl he has loved for forty-five years, the face that haunted him, that he could never forget. In this half, he explores childhood memories, his coming of age and the war years. We are also immersed in Yambo's richest, selected memories. Catholic education and guilt, war stories, Josephine Baker, comic books and Cyrano de Bergerac. At a certain point he realises that he is in a coma, that he might even be dead. He prays that if nothing else, he be allowed to just stay where he is for another seventeen days or so - remembering. |
