The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco

Yambo, a sixty year old rare book dealer who lives in Milan wakes up in a hospital bed and realizes he has lost his memory or rather his autobiographical memory. His semantic memory is still there, he knows who Caesar and Napoleon were, but not who he is, he can recite every poem he's ever read but doesn't recognise his wife or daughters. His wife suggests that in order to recover his memory he should go to their house in the country in search of his past . Yambo spends a long time in the house going through all the old books and comics and magazines stored there, trying to remember, trying to make sense of it all.
Yambo was sixty in the 1990s so he was a few years younger than my parents but many of the books and comics he mentions were also in my house when I was a child and I grew up with those book covers, some of the music he mentions and other things and images so well illustrated here. And the themes and stories, how strange it was to be a kid in the Mussolini era, listening to patriotic anthems and then to light tunes, reading about Balilla and then rushing to buy Mickey Mouse. I read the book in Italian, of course, and I cannot even imagine how hard it must have been to render it in English. American and English and to certain degrees French culture have been acquired by the common memory/imagination bank through films and literature and music, but the Italy described in Eco's book is so intimate to us who were there. One of the pictures is an illustration taken, I think, from a 1915 edition of Pinocchio. Of course Pinocchio was one of the texts children read in elementary school and I had my own copy, with a red cover and the face of Pinocchio in felt on the front. It also looks like Eco and I read the same comic magazine, called Corriere dei Piccoli with the most fabulous array of characters including a little girl with a cat called Ferraù who used to fly around the world in a bath tub. A non-Italian will like this book because of Eco's amazing talent and knowledge, but to me it was reliving my own life in a day.