Dear Don and List,

After I got the posting (see below) I decided to read Umberto Eco´s book in connection to Nabokov´s own mnemic abilities and "paper memories".

I realized that the article ( entitled PLAYING IN THE ATTIC OF ITALY UNDER IL DUCE) offers a small link with VN´s own investigations in the attic scene in "Ada" (secrets are better kept in the upper stories than in basements or cellars... ).

It is not because our reminiscing hero, Yambo, has read Verne´s Captain Grant, made reference to Philleas Fogg or had a sister called Ada, but because one of his daughters was named Nicoletta. The novel´s old hero discovers the importance of a booklet "Huit jours dans un grenier" because of certain vague feelings he associated to the story of a fugitive Nicolette that was kept hidden in the attic for eight days.

We can check this in the first chapters of ADA:

" According to the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed), and that had survived with other old papers in the cockloft of Ardis Hall, the Veen-Durmanov wedding took place (...) A girl was born on July 21, 1872, at Ardis, her putative father’s seat in Ladore County, and for some obscure mnemonic reason was registered as Adelaida(...)Besides that old illustrated section (...) our frolicsome Pimpernel and Nicolette found in the same attic a reel box containing (...) The two kids’ best find, however, came from another carton in a lower layer of the past. This was a small green album with neatly glued flowers that Marina had picked or otherwise obtained at Ex(...) ‘Good for you, Pompeianella (whom you saw scattering her flowers in one of Uncle Dan’s picture books, but whom I admired last summer in a Naples museum). Now don’t you think we should resume our shorts and shirts and go down, and bury or burn this album at once, girl. Right?"

We find the transformation of "Nicky and Pimpernella" into "Pimpernel and Nicolette" and later, into "Pompeianella". And yet, when Darkbloom notes: "p.11. Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children" we are led away from the French booklet on Nicolette, although we cannot miss the exchange of roles ( masculine Nicky and Pimpernel; feminine Pimpernella and Nicolette) or their mingling.

Since I haven´t read, nor had access to the book mentioned by Umberto Eco about Nicolette´s eight days in the attic, I cannot reach any pertinent conclusion. Would VN have made a hidden reference to this French book? Why was it hidden behind a "comic strip for French-speaking children"? Did Umberto Eco make an abstruse reference to Nabokov by choosing the names Ada and Nicolette to encircle his character?

I haven´t yet read Eco´s entire book, perhaps later on there is an answer to that. But I thought someone in our list might enjoy this first link and try his own "paper hunt".

Jansy

----- Original Message -----

From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>

To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2005 8:26 PM

Subject: Fwd: Nabokov in his autobiography "Speak, Memory" ...

EDNOTE. I would add to the below that Umberto Eco (whose very name sounds like
VN made it up) wrote a short VN parody a good many years
ago,--------------------

----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
    Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 01:11:23 -0400
    From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: Nabokov in his autobiography "Speak, Memory" ...
      To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com

------------------ [1]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0607/p16s02-bogn.html[2]

                        Playing in the attic of Italy under Il Duce
Christian Science Monitor - 7 hours ago
... "Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very
careless girl," says VLADIMIR NABOKOV in his autobiography "Speak,
Memory," and the Russian author ...

                        [3]

        from the June 07, 2005 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0607/p16s02-bogn.html

PLAYING IN THE ATTIC OF ITALY UNDER IL DUCE

LIKED \'NAME OF THE ROSE\' AND \'BARTLETT\'S QUOTATIONS\'? YOU\'LL
LOVE THIS ECO

        BY YVONNE ZIPP

        A man wakes up from a coma with no memory of who he is. It's a
well-worn plot device - either classic or clichéd, depending on the
skill of the storyteller - that has played a pivotal role in the
careers of everyone from assassin Jason Bourne to Kermit the Frog.

        Meet Giambattista "Yambo" Bodoni, an antiquarian book dealer who can
remember every poem and novel he's ever read but can't recognize the
faces of his wife or daughters. Since Yambo is the creation of
Italian author Umberto Eco, he's very well read indeed.

        It's a crisis that should inspire feelings of panic or pathos, but
since Yambo displays a breathtaking lack of curiosity about either
the woman with whom he's spent 30 years or the two daughters that he
apparently used to dote on, it evokes more of a shrug.

        Yambo spends his first few days out of the hospital obsessing about
whether he's ever bedded his lovely blond assistant. Since the first
thing his wife, Paola, told him about their marriage was that he'd
had affairs - lots of them - this is apparently par for the course.

        Eco has no interest in exploring "Regarding Henry" territory; his
protagonist isn't about to use a bout of amnesia to do something so
banal as become a better person. Instead, Eco uses Yambo's plight to
catalog the collective memory of the generation of Italians who grew
up under Benito Mussolini.

        In an effort to recover his memory, Yambo leaves Milan for his
family's country home, Solara, to sift through the paper trail of his
childhood. He spends his days in the "hazel silence of the attic,"
trying to construct a "paper memory."

        Eco does more than tell us what Yambo is reading - he shows us, with
gorgeous reproductions of Strand magazine illustrations, stamps,
fascist anthems, and Flash Gordon comics that pepper the story's
pages. (Not all of them are ones you'd want your kids leafing
through: There's a table of torture and a risqué picture or two.)
It's a gimmick but an effective one, and one that longtime fans of
Eco will definitely appreciate, since he has said in interviews that
most of the memorabilia comes from his personal collection. Yambo,
like Eco, also has a vast collection of literary quotations about
fog. (I recognized about two: Carl Sandburg's "the fog comes on
little cat feet," and Dickens's opening to "Bleak House.")

        Those who don't enjoy the occasional ramble through "Bartlett's
Quotations" may quickly lose patience with "Queen Loana," but
bookworms will get an added kick out of puzzling out the dozens of
literary allusions. Even more than Eco's "The Name of the Rose," his
new novel "is a tale of books." It's probably illegal to write a book
about memory without referencing Marcel Proust and his crumbly cookie,
but Eco is just as erudite about Mandrake the Magician.

        When the doctor asks if Yambo can remember his name, he replies, "My
name is Arthur Gordon Pym," the opening line of Edgar Allan Poe's only
novel, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket," considered
by some to be an inspiration for "Moby-Dick." When asked to try
again, Yambo says, "Call me Ishmael?" (See, it's fun!) Yambo is as
much at sea as those two shipwrecked gents: He gets "mysterious
flames" of recognition, but he can only tell that he remembers, not
what the memory is.

        "Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless
girl," says Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography "Speak, Memory,"
and the Russian author knew all about the impossibility of
reconstructing emotional memory from paper. "I have often noticed
that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some
treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world
where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind,
its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone."

        It takes a second coma for Yambo to access his memories and for the
reader to learn how fog, stamps from Fiji, and the comic book sound
"sfft" are all inextricably linked. Less of a payoff (for the reader
anyway) are Yambo's returning memories of Lila Saba, the object of
his lifelong obsession.

        "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is impressive in the sheer
breadth of knowledge intertwined to form a national consciousness,
and the tale it tells is engaging, but it could have had even more
resonance if its protagonist had been less self-absorbed. To a
certain degree, his life story shares the same shortcoming that Yambo
diagnoses in himself: "I don't have feelings, I only have memorable
sayings."

        . _Yvonne Zipp is a freelance writer in Kalamazoo, Mich._

        The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
By Umberto Eco
_Harcourt_449 pp, $27

        Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics,
and related links[4]

                        THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA
By Umberto Eco
Harcourt
449 pp, $27

Links:
------
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/
[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0607/p16s02-bogn.html
[3] http://www.csmonitor.com/index.html
[4] http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0607/p16s02-bogn.html

----- End forwarded message -----