Word: ecoã
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Khoury even seems gleefully happy to revel in the mysteries surrounding the Templars. At one point he even has one of Chaykin’s co-workers quote Umberto Eco??s famous statement about the group, telling her that “a sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars...
Like his first and most popular work of fiction, “The Name of the Rose,” Eco??s new book presents itself as a kind of detective story. But here the author, whose nonfiction work centers on semiotics, seems to care less about providing coherent clues than about dazzling us with the sheer variety of his mind’s palette...
...could dispute that the result is formidably learned. Eco??s knowledge is vast, and, under only the vaguest pretenses of narrative, “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana” lets him broach subjects ranging from Dante’s Inferno to Dick Tracy comics...
...however brilliant and entertaining Eco??s theoretical texts may be, one wonders why he didn’t just take a cue from Harold Bloom and hand us an annotated summer reading list. After all, a novel that cites Melville, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Eliot, and others in its opening pages alone can hardly help but make us think, a little wistfully, of how else we might have spent our time...
...safe to assume, given the scope of his learning, that Eco had Knox’s precepts in mind when he composed this novel. I just am not sure that he duly prepped us to be invested in a character who does little but meander through Eco??s own favorites...