Tricks played by memory

In a learned essay on semiotics (and here, I imagine, the chaste Spectator reader will blanch but, steeling himself for the worst, bravely carry on reading) published in 1979, Umberto Eco explored the role of the reader in the construction of a text. The essay, ‘Lector in fabula’ — punning on the Latin tag, ‘lupus in fabula’, ‘the wolf in the story’ or, as we would say, ‘talk of the devil’ — invited us to consider how a text is transformed, completed and appropriated by a ‘naive’ reader willing to play the game of fiction.

Twenty-six years later, Eco has decided to grant that naive reader a book of his own. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana recounts the adventures of a lector in fabula, a man who loses all memory of himself and of the present, and lives only in the literary memory of his past readings, in a world of quotations both textual and iconographic that replaces in his mind the real world outside.