On The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Currently Reading)

One afternoon, she emitted an irresistible hiccup, blushed slightly (in your blood, which spreads its flames across your face, the cosmos makes it laughter). p.75

There are two different cerebral networks: the implicit (automatic actions such as body functions or driving skills) and the explicit (semantic and episodic memory). Semantic memory is a public-access memory, our knowledge of history and our remembrance of what we’ve read. Episodic memory stores events with an emotional attachment (what your name is, who your wife is, where and how you were raised, your passions, your soul).

The protagonist suffers a form of amnesia that only made his semantic memory function. Possessing knowledge of history and the world but not of himself, parroting beautiful lines verbatim out of the myriad literature he’s read, he sets out to resurrect his soul.

That’s me simplifying (probably in the ugliest possible way) the basic plot of the novel. Pushing it further to bad taste, I’d go on in saying that this is the Bourne Identity of Antiquarians (the protagonist being an antique book-dealer).

It’s been fascinating; how your mind can be so embellished with so much poetry and knowledge without so much remembering when you were born or who were the women whom you’ve made love to. Eco's style and execution makes this fascinating effect possible as he attacks with a whole stable of masterfully-chosen quotations and references. The illustrations are rich, but it doesn't leave you thoughtless. A hundred pages into the book, I was ready to concede that this was one of the best reads of my life.

Somewhere in his search for his soul, something in my own memory awakens. Inevitably relating myself to what I'm reading, I'm thrown back - cushioned with tender, delightful remembrance: to the long hours in the DLSU library. I rummage through my own attic of memory. I am reading, drunk with the moldy smell of so many pages my nose dove in between. I discovered and made so much of myself based off on what I've read and my experiencince of reading. And the book is still so pleasurably doing that now.

Even on a more universal level, our identity is interwoven not only with the facts but also with fictions made about the historical and aesthetic progression of this world.

It must be why we keep reading.