INVISIBLE CITIES XIV -- Cities and Memory: MAURILIA

1. Why do the inhabitants prefer the city represented in the postcards?  What influence does the nature of the postcard have--on the city, or, generically, on anything?  Is there a difference between a postcard and, say, a regular photograph in its ability to depict a time or place?  What would happen (stay with me here) if memory worked both directions, toward the future as well as the past, and there were postcards of present Maurilia available for past Maurilians to examine?
2. For some reason this reminds me (story and movie) of Benjamin Button.
3. The second paragraph of the vignette discusses how two cities can exist simultaneously--two cities which are one city: one place, one name (same citizenry??), two cities.  Maybe this is going out on a limb, but if each vignette is a puzzle piece, what clue might Maurilia offer toward anticipation of the final, completed picture?  Does it have to be just two cities in one, or could the number be even potentially infinite within the confines of one geographic space and one name?
4. By extension (and this against the end of the first sentence of paragraph two), is it possible for there to be two or more people with the same body and the same name (and no, this is not an issue of schizophrenia or multiple personalities)?  And further, families, schools, countries, teams, gods, etcetera?
5. The final lines of the vignette tie back to the first question: is it just the nature of the postcard, that it describes a fiction rather than a reality, or is there truly a second city existing in the same plane and plot as the other Maurilia?

INVISIBLE CITIES XIII -- chapter 2, ..... 1

Kublai Khan

1. Pattern would hold that the opening sequence of the chapter two holds a question to which the final lines of the chapters pose an answer.  What is/are the question/s?
2. When I first read this, I didn't get it very well.  The possibility that Kublai Khan and Marco Polo weren't even talking, but only imagining to talk made me wonder if they were both present at all.  Was Marco Polo, alone on some journey of his, imagining what it might be like to be explorer and official reporter to someone like The Great Khan?  From your perspective, what do you think?  I believe this makes sense on my second pass, but only maybe.  Considering the issues of nostalgia and memory, and past, present, and future, what is, at the very least, affecting, and at the most heavily tinting or obscuring, all of Polo's reports?
3. "You advance always with your head turned back?" and "Is what you see always behind you?" thus "He must go to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him": Is it possible to begin to gain access to a new culture--or a new anything--without using as initial framework/schema what you already know?  So no matter how far you travel, you ... what?  Experience the new only in context of the old?  And is this a reiteration of the same issue regarding two people of different languages and cultures talking to each other?
4. And what does the final line mean: "The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have"?  This echoes, I think (thoughts?), the last exchange between the men from the close of chapter one.  What's the connection?
5. Finally, back to the first paragraph here, what is the value Kublai Khan places on Polo's reports?  He doesn't want from him the information on taxes and politics and trade and treasure.

INVISIBLE CITIES VIII -- Cities and Memory: ZORA

image courtesy of designplaygrounds.com

Zora: a South and West Slavic word meaning "dawn, aurora".

1. How does Marco Polo really know what he claims to know of Zora as it no longer exists?  And the vignette's final paragraph reflects interestingly against the first sentence, which states of Zora that, "no one, having seen it, can forget."  So when it's gone... what?  Memory cannot be inherited, after all.
2. I mentioned synecdoche and metonymy in the last post about Tamara.  Inasmuch as either of these is a sort of--and maybe this is a stretch--mnemonic (and more so than just another crazy spelling) are all of the disparate and unforgettable points, all mnemonics really, synecdochic or metonymic of the whole--all for one and one for all?
3. If the most learned men are those who've memorized Zora and anyone who visits Zora cannot forget it, wouldn't anyone who simply visits and sees [all of] Zora become another of the most learned men?
4. This city is a little difficult for me to grasp.  Is it set up as it is only be ironic in the end?  This alone would make sense, but it leaves Zora otherwise shallower than the preceding cities.
5. Well, maybe not.  The whole notion of this city's memorableness together with its passing reminds me of the danger faced by the general world's public by the loss of a culture.  Loss of a spoken language.  Loss of oral traditions.  Loss of purity in aboriginal bloodlines.  Once lost, it will never return.  Some things, no matter the scholarship that pursues it after its demise, will never be brought back.  Only Jurassic Park managed that.

INVISIBLE CITIES V -- Cities and Memory: ZAIRA

"Zaira, City of High Bastions," courtesy
behance.net (click this!)

Zaira is related, and fairly obviously so, to our Sarah and happens to mean "lady" or "princess" in both (and I wish I knew more of the linking history ... McWhorter? ... or is it coincidence?) Hebrew and "Irish" (Gaelic, that is), and "Rose" in Arabic.  That's all fine and dandy, of course, but it marks a difference in theme--if not gender--from the first three cities.  Thoughts?

1. This first sentence, I think, captures the whole reason behind the Great Khan's fascination with Polo's descriptions.  However, do such subjective descriptions do him any good?
2. According to the rest of this first paragraph, what then is the relationship between the "measurements of its space" (physical locations or landmarks (?)) and the "events of its past" (memory)?
3. What do you make of "...the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock."  Does this offer a window into either Calvino (or is he too shrewd to so expose himself) or at least one of the two characters?
4. "...but contains [memory] like the lines of a hand."  Palmistry?  Forget divination for a minute; what's the connection here, and can the memories therefor be "read" at all?  Or is there an issue of magic at hand here after all?  Is memory and its ties to things a mysticism or conjure?
5. Moving, relocating, is an engagement that sparks the memory.  Packing up items, sorting through boxes for treasure and trash, reorganization, etcetera bring past the hands and eyes items--landmarks--that hold in their essence, that trigger, memories.  Those memories are written like so many scars into the collections of junk we accumulate.  Do we throw away those memories, as certainly the runes of their recording are gone, when we throw away the landmarks?  I haven't thought about my Boy Scout days in ten years, but sorting through that old box because we've got to trim the fat down to naught, I encountered stacks and stacks of long-hidden memories.  But as Zaira absorbs like a sponge the waves of memory that happen within it, are those memories ever available to any of those who walk past the chink in a wall or who were not present when the hole appeared in the net?  Or does each citizen have access to an adequate number of memorial artifacts that those of others don't matter?  What do you make of the very physical, earthy, and private nature of the memories of Zaira?  Or do I have it wrong and all is shared by all?
6. So, the "high bastions."  If the city is swollen with memories--even built entirely of memory--it stands to reason that the bastions would be so tall.  But a "bastion" is a defense.  Thoughts?

castle bastion at Copertino, Italy

INVISIBLE CITIES II -- Cities and Memory 1: DIOMIRA

courtesy bonacho-portuguessave.blogspot.com

1. Many (all, actually, if I'm not mistaken) of Calvino's cities are girls' names.  Diomira is no exception.  My go-to site for name etymology is behindthename.com, which I've used here before.  Today, it failed me.  I found information instead here, and by extension here, which gives the meaning as the "important woman in the village."  The name is allegedly Spanish, but if we look at it from the Italian perspective (admittedly not all that different, particularly in this case), then we can break it into its constituent parts: Dio and mira.  Dio is, of course, God, and Mira (in nominal form) aim, sight, target, butt, end, goal, design (from my well-worn, i.e. beat-to-ribbons, Dizionario Inglese E Italiano by Loescher) and (verbal, "mirare") to take aim, to admire, to gaze, or in its reflexive, to look at oneself.  Thoughts?
2. Notice the motion of the first sentence?  From where are we leaving?  Why begin thus if, without context, we cannot know the starting point, in which case the direction and distance are useless, geographically speaking?
3. What is the poetical power (that is to say dripping rhetoric) of this line, "...is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time"?
4. Compare that line above to the general theme of entropy from the introductory ......
5. There's a dreamlike quality to Diomira--idyllic and distant.  Does it regard the name, Diomira, as discussed above?  How does it regard the type, Cities of Memory?
6. Notice also the sense of fairytale to the description: the 60 of this, the golden and crystal that, the idealized season.  How does this correlate back to Marco Polo and begin build his character (this is a longterm as well as an immediate question)?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVIII -- chapter 17: THE BIRTH OF AN ATHEIST

Baptism of Augustine of Hippo

1. Interesting parallel: As an adult, the forgetfulness came without warning, like death in the night unexpected; as a child, death came without warning and all around him, and he had to work, "providently," to push out its memory, forget, and move on with his life.  The forced forgetting is very much like the Christian notion of repentance, but repentance must be voluntary like the childhood flushing of repugnant memory.  How then would you metaphorically qualify Yambo's adult amnesia?  Finally, as baptism is sometimes identified as a second birth, or spiritual birth/rebirth, does it fit in anywhere with all this?
2. How is Yambo's conclusion, "God does not exist," not surprising, coming as it does, of course, from his life and development?
3. Describe Yambo's relationship with sin.  How might this lead to the man we know (if we know) he became later?
4. Fine books and fine music become Yambo's gods after the episode in the gorge.  How is this, well, idolatry so much more convenient, yet, at least by the strictures of human limitation, comparably satisfying/challenging?
5. Yambo's life experiences were echoed in and formulated by his books.  He found meaning, explanation, and interpretation at writers' hands.  He experiences a form--perverted--of chaste indulgence by the leniencies allowed in text, "not flesh."  Does this open a window, as it were, overlooking the First Folio; and, by extension, how is the First Folio indeed Lila?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XVI -- chapter 15: IN THE WAKE OF GOD ISSUING FROM THE MACHINE

1. "Maybe I am not dead. If I were, I would feel no worldly passions, no love for my parents or anxiety about the bombings. To die is to remove oneself from the cycle of life and from the beating of one’s heart."  Was he dead and now lives?  Maybe (and this is just me being optimistic, because we still have to gain some additional connection to or by the First Folio) his resurgence--even resurrection--is truly a gift from God, who has emerged from the strange machinations of Yambo's (and Eco's, I think) dirge.
2. By the context of the book, the machine of it, a great shock was required to bring Yambo back from ... whatever you want to call it.  What else, and anything less Deus ex Machina-like than the Folio, could have done it?
3. Am I projecting my own beliefs onto the text, or do Yambo's ruminations (consider the evidence of the soul versus that of the encephalogram) have the true whiff of one wrestling with himself over a religious belief and/or awakening?  It was said, after all, in the last chapter that the boy Yambo was religious.
4. I may not be able to adequately articulate this:  Yambo, before the stroke, was selfish and even dismissive of (1) his past and (2) his loved ones.  Except for the subconscious (maybe that's too kind a word for it) ambition to find his Lila, he was entirely and selfishly only about his immediate "now."  "...may I be granted the gift of fierce selfishness. I live with myself and for myself, and I can remember that which, after my first incident, I had forgotten."  Has the amnesia just been a literal manifestation of what he'd been doing by his negligence as an adult all along, anyway?  Only now after the discovery of the Folio and now powerless within this new fog, everything internal, does he long for his wife and daughters, for a firm grip of and power over the memory and application of his past?
5. (Angelo Bear and his life and death bear a shocking similarity to Toy Story 3.  Just saying.)
6. "It is clear now, in the coma’s silence, that I understand better all that has happened to me. Is this the illumination others achieve when they come to the brink, at which point, like Martin Eden, they understand everything, but as they know, they cease to know? I, who am not yet on the brink, have an advantage over those who die. I understand, I know, and I even remember (now) that I know. Does that make me one of the lucky?"

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XII -- chapter 11: PHILATELY

I'm tempted to call this chapter a little self-indulgent on the part of Eco, except that I enjoy this chapter.  It's quiet, pensive, and offers an effect of the Calm Before the Storm, and all the little pieces collected might be assembled, somehow, later to make some more complete picture.  Maybe.  Whatever.  As far as I'm concerned, there are only really three questions here:

1. What parallel can you draw between Yambo and the purportedly poorly-told tale of Queen Loana and her Mysterious Flame, despite Yambo's claim that he must have moved past the lamentable narrative in favor of the exotic and suggestive--mellifluous--names?
2. What connection is there (indeed identified, at least simply, if no more than skatingly, by Yambo) between philatery and all those comic books, another kind of philately in itself, though with a sort of (this is stretching, I know) tax exemption all its own?
3. Will the memory return if he jumps into the fog filling the gorge?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VIII -- chapter 7: THE MEMORIOUS

1. Just the first two paragraphs of this chapter already give the impression of the trope of one's life flashing before his eyes.  Obviously there are inherent problems to the application of this metaphor here; the Benjamin Button/Signor Pipino complex, on the other hand, may be more appropriate.  Thoughts?
2. "Sibilla was now beginning to seem like a distant childhood memory, while everything I was gradually excavating from the fog of my past was becoming my present" (emphasis added).  Explain.
3. In color, Eco's description of the attic resembles that of Joyce's general description of Dublin (a perhaps likely comparison, considering Eco's admiration for Joyce): brown, in all its variations.  However, this attic is nothing like Dublin.  What is the difference--defined in terms of color, or substance--between the two?
4. I don't generally associate Eco with poetry, the way I do with other prose writers, like, and especially so, Borges (who wrote a lot of poetry); however, this sentence, "If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pulverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artificial canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna," is gorgeous and poetic.  More, there's a potentially fascinating indication in it, ascribing a sort of natural metaphor (and recalling and defining vast amounts of literature in the process) to the house, or even to architecture in general.
5. Further to the Dantean "Commedic" (#4) and Button/Pipino themes (#1), justify Eco's use of his brief "womb" analogy, and why, perhaps in Yambo's case, the genetic (is the adjectival form of genesis really genetic?) locus of garret is more appropriate than cellar.
6. Some great "p" words here: pluvial, pulverulent (and here)
7. What is the inherent problem with Yambo's belief that Clarabelle's treasure is "certainly there"; or, rather, what's the inherent issue to what we might call The Paradox of Clarabelle's Treasure?
8. Further information of Clarabelle as a name: Clara (also clara/chiara, Italian, meaning "clear"); belle (also bella, Italian, meaning "beautiful" and related to bene, for good); and Claribel, and Clara.
9. All three tins' illustrations (two of them: the cocoa "Due Vecchi" ("two old people"), the antacid, "Brioschi" (company name)) have a woman serving a man, and note the ages of the women, where given.  Appropriate?  And, of course, the image-within-an-image....
10. This paragraph with the repeating images and infinite return/regression, is pretty bleak, hopeless.  If he is indeed at the bottom of the regression, holding the tin, then it should be finite, else there would be no bottom; but in fact, by the physics of reflection and Mobius strips and whatnot, it is infinite, in which case Yambo will never arrive at himself.
11. "At the instant he knew, he ceased to know."  This recalls, of course, the flashing-before-the-eyes mentioned in #1.
12. Yambo, the author, is the forebear of our protagonist's nickname, yet it's his our hero's hero, Ciuffettino, with whom our Yambo identifies himself.  (Did you get that?)
13. If you haven't yet read "Funes, His Memory," By Borges, (here, "Funus, the Memorious," and not my preference for translation, ignorant though I am generally of Spanish), you should do so now.
14. I'm not going to bother with speculations on the cresch's fountain. 

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VI -- chapter 5: OF GOOD FOOD, GHOSTS, and ... STUFF

a vineyard in the Monferrato hill country, Italy

1. I think we all knew the Mickey Mouse cartoon about Clarabelle and her treasure would come back.  I suppose the number of sources for metaphors on memory and collecting are endless; so why something like Mickey Mouse et alia?  (And how perfectly the comments from Chapter 4 predict this first point as well as the title of the new section!)
2. "...I could not help tasting one [fig] and venturing to say that that tree always had been bountiful...."  Is Yambo trying out his ability to generate memory, and to what end?
3. What of the "memory of humanity," and the peaches, the poop, and the grapes?  When I first read this, it took me by surprise, especially when there was a bathroom just inside.  But consider the contrast from Milan to Solara in the first place.  The descent into the vineyard is perhaps but the final steps of this journey to the bottom of the well, back of the cave, to the very beginning and all its metaphoric baggage.  (Aside from all this, I think these few paragraphs are hilarious.)
4. Borromini
5. I wonder about Eco's use of "spirit" here: "In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions. [¶]  "And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since my reawakening."  Is he admitting a level of spirituality or is it separate and/or euphemistic?
6. The general American population doesn't understand, or fully comprehend, the level at which other cultures (generally not first world, or which were relatively recently and widely impoverished) hold/value their food.  Like a language, it really has to be lived, rather than just studied.  With few exceptions (generally holidays, though school-day lunch periods may also qualify, though not for reason food quality), we eat simply because we need to, and without ceremony.  Our culture is not built around our meals; we come by them too easily.  Also, and at its simplest, it's also directly connected to that very personal issue of defecation from earlier.
7. A little Carrollian riddle: How is a Yambo like a house cat?
8. Owls = ghosts, pretty much always by the way, or phantoms more generally and symbolically speaking.
9. If Paola is acting mother in the tale, this journey away from her and home, more than just a quest, is also a test: can Yambo control his eating, among other things, without mommy breathing down his neck, making this story a sort of coming-of-age (yes, I'm intentionally avoiding the more "correct" literary snob term).  Thoughts (about the question or the contents of the parentheses)?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana V -- chapter 4: PREPARATORY GARDENING AND PRUNING

1. For whatever reason, Yambo "skated" over his childhood and adolescence, rather than tell his wife all about it.  Something in his past, voluntarily or involuntarily, is being avoided.  I sense a parallel story--or nearly so, because why in the world would Eco not want these two lines to converge!  Of course, the "distant past" will be likely easier to unlock than the more recent.
2. The same paragraph of Paola's that gave us the skated youth also indicates some other traits/weaknesses of Yambo.  Does the information here lead you to any predictions?
3. Note the musical preference for pop over "high-culture" opera (though, of course, opera and "classical" music were the pop music of their day).
4. The general region of the pylorus combined with Yambo's knee-jerk descriptor of a "mysterious flame" seem to indicate something spiritual, or, considering Eco's atheism (and giving Yambo the benefit of the autobiographical doubt), existential--or vertiginous.  Thoughts?
5. Draw out the repeated connection between memory and collection, both of which, apparently, this book is all about.
6. I don't know if Eco is a Freudian or not, but I'm guessing that he likely is.  I'm not particularly eager to discuss at length his purchase at the flea market, but manifestations of potentially latent issues may be keys to unlocking the cave.
7. This is likely a stretch, the continued metaphor from the last chapter of flowers and deflowering; I wonder if there's a connection of some sort (and it seems more Joycean than Freudian--more literary than psychoanalytic--and along the lines of "Araby") between the the impenetrable cave and, say, the protected chalice, carried by "Araby"'s protagonist.  Are all the sexual undercurrents of this chapter indicative of the approaching "deflowering" of the locked-up, otherwise impenetrable Cave of Wonders?  Is this connection inherently flawed, as presupposing similar value upon Yambo's lost past as the flower of virginity (though, of course, he is a bit of an egomaniac)? *** But cultures may get in the way a little bit here, as Italy, as well as much of Europe, is much more sexually progressive than the United States; perhaps virginity is not quite the assumed treasure there as here (and we're losing that!).  Certainly The Virgin is one of the most significant emblems for Italy, as with all dominantly Catholic cultures, and most Christian cultures for that matter, of course, but, perhaps, as Mary was/is the epitomized Virgin, no other virgin need so aspire, so why bother at all?  I don't know.  I'm rambling.  But there seems to me to be something here.  I am, as always, interested in your thoughts.
8. Flowers, the most glorious of garden elements, may perhaps continue the line of Eden here.  But what happens if you deflower (as in memory and/or virginity, as discussed in 7) Eden?  I mean, is Yambo in his Eden now, or is he seeking to return to it wholly, or is it a step along the way (Solara, then, being Eden) to regain his past?  Yes, I know, this is all very, very speculative, but it's currently interesting me.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana III -- chapter 2: I AM A BURNING LOG

Cornell's copy of the "First Folio"

Regardless of the edition you have of the book, you should have something pop-culturish to look at on its cover. This ties into the title of the book, which we'll go into a little deeper a little later.  However, I can't let a title like this of a book like this go without at least some minor examination.  "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is an episode title of an old, American adventure comic called, Tim Tyler's Luck, which was translated into Italian.  With this, as well as any flipping-through you might have done (and which, in this rare case, I encourage), I'd like to preface a secondary "big question" for this book: what does pop culture have to do with the formation of our memory--our memory as it applies to our definition of self, inasmuch as Yambo has lost his (memory/self)?  As it turns out, and if I remember rightly, there's a lot more pop culture affecting this highly-learned man's personal history than stuff so highbrow as Shakespeare's First Folio.

1. Yambo's discourse about jumping reminds me of Life of Pi: (approximately) You run as far as the legs of reason will carry you and then leap.
2. I wonder (insubstantially; inconsequentially): If we know our own smells and the smell of our home and car so well that we don't even notice them, would Yambo "notice" his own smell, or that of home, car, wife, kids, etcetera?
3. Considering the other novels mentioned (The Betrothed, Orlando Furioso, and Le Pere Goriot), what do supposed is Eco's position on Catcher in the Rye?  (Having read a lot of Eco's literary criticism and philosophy, Rye doesn't seem like typical reading for study by Eco.  Salinger is a different kind of brilliant (though, in my opinion, certainly no less, and, well, perhaps even greater) than Proust and Joyce, whom he definitely admires and even loves.
4. The languages from which Yambo quotes a few verses are also Eco's second languages: German, French, and English.
5. Interesting that Yambo documented fog even before the amnesia.  Any connection, or just coincidence (as author, certainly Eco did it intentionally, but is there anything to this within the confines of the novel)?  Regardless, fog, if I remember correctly, will be a lasting motif and even theme of the book.  How might one be born into a fog?
6. Yambo's life was fractious before the amnesia.  Does this lower the significance of the amnesia, or mean that anyone who's life is split like Yambo's undergoes his own kind of amnesia?  Or something else?
7. As alluded to earlier, Eco doesn't do anything by accident.  What of the mention of the Garden of Eden (despite the shtick of the "tree of good and evil")?
8. Compare the predictions by the tolling clock to the running start before the leap.
9. ....like Tom Sawyer ... or Luke Skywalker!
10. Interesting the automatic response (and the Eco thought of it!) of Yambo's old and best friend, who, in the face of him with whom he's experienced nearly everything and with whom the past doesn't need to be discussed, as it's always been present between them, he can't help--and you get the impression the he can't help finally--reliving all those old events.
11. Such dividing lines are always marked with turmoil--or tumult.  What we were before the event is very different from the person after the event, though, as far as I've observed and experienced, the change after the fault is usually linked directly to the tumultuous event itself, like changing religions, giving up drugs/alcohol, vowing an honest life.  In this case, Yambo, of course, is entirely innocent of the cause of the divide.  Will he change? Certainly he's different now, but will he remain so--changed, for better or worse--once his self has been returned to him or reclaimed?  For instance, he's discovering that he was quite a playboy.  Does he regret it?  Will it cause change?  (There more's substance for discussing this in the next chapter.)
12. Finally, keep your eyes open for treasure.  For bibliophiles like us (and I'm assuming, I doubt foolishly or presumptuously, that anyone who actually reads this blog must consider themselves, to one advanced degree or another, bibliophilic), Yambo deals daily in treasure; it's his job.  We will come across the "First Folio" soon (-ish?), as well as other treasures, which will offer substance for discussion.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana II -- chapter 1: OF THE MEMORY and SOUL

I am not a skeptical reader.  Where so many people are mistrusting by nature, I'm, well, even gullible.  This applies as much to reading as it does to locking doors and triple-checking the curling iron or stove top.  When I read Steinbeck or Carroll, or even Joyce, I feel justified in my level of trust, as their writing so closely reflects the issues, weaknesses, and prejudices of their lives--not so much when I read Eco.  There's never a sense of autobiography when you read his books, except, perhaps for Mysterious Flame (more on that in a minute).  There's rarely that sense that his Freudian psyche rests just between the lines.  His craft is opaque, and it makes sense, in a literalist's kind of way: his writing is incredibly, even--and so it would seem if he didn't provide proof against it--impossibly, dense.  The problem with such authorial opacity for a trusting, gullible kinda guy like me, is that I believe there's indeed nothing on the other side of the glass.  Well, this isn't the case.  While Eco mostly leaves himself out of the book, as far as we can see or intuit or study out via the generally available biographical information, there is a lot here.  Surprisingly (at least to me), and at perhaps the level most literarily profound and snobby, there's a deeply Joycean philosophy at work here, which I will try, despite my amateurism, to point out (as it relates essentially to the most fundamental pieces of Modernism); at a less intimidating level (you know--without all the literary labels that otherwise identify and describe), there is a underlining, beautiful metaphor--even allegory--at work in this book which may even pose as a window, no matter how small or filmy, into Eco himself.  If there is a book of Eco's with anything autobiographical, this is it.  We just have to press through all the incredibly abundant intellectual bread crumbs to get there--not that I mind.

1. Where later we get visual mementos (flip or scroll through your copy of the book), when Yambo (this is a nickname: his real name is Giambattista Bodoni) first awakes, they come via literary quotations.  What is the thematic line running through these literary--poetic very visual, at least for words--references, and how are they so appropriate to the situation (you can get this without knowing the sources for all these quotations)?
2. Note the juxtaposition of technology looking quantitatively into Yambo's brain (barely mentioned) and the series of recollections--literary, historical, etcetera--which accord us a qualitative purview.  
3. I'm positing an idea that may work out to be nothing, but the context here offers possibility:  If the experience of Yambo's amnesia (the world that begins when he wakes up and ends, presumably, when he regains his memory) is a microcosm for mortal existence, what do you make of his standing up from his hospital bed?  While we're at it, what other parallels do you see between newborns and this 60-year-old (nearly) man?
4. Interesting the notion of the mirror's reflection (and this apart from Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass): with the exception of those few individuals with perfectly symmetrical faces, the face one sees in the mirror is not the same face that another sees.  The effect is less significant with both faces simultaneously before you, like Eco's double-portrait (above), but if you take it as truth (the difference between reflection and the "real"), how does it apply here?
5. "...from now on I think I will brush my teeth every day, it feels nice" (emphasis added).
6. There's an irony here: "...if we had to record and store all the stimuli we encounter, our memory would be a bedlam."
7. Also, a line shortly after that of 6 gives indication of the type of our allegory: "Where the brain stores memories, however, is still a matter of debate, and more than one area is certainly involved."  Have you already spotted it, especially while flipping/scrolling through the pages?
8. the Collegno amnesiac
9. Big question: Are we our memories?  In tandem with this, memories are nearly as "plastic," as says Yambo's doctor, as the mind.  How we perceive our own memories is practically never how they exactly happened.  Thoughts?
10. What if his wife were ugly?  I can't help but wonder--and it's impossible to prove one way or the other, but this is the romantic side of me--if there's some essence of his love reaching through the fog and affecting his impression of her.  Is she really so objectively pretty, or is the subjectivity of long love acting as, well, goggles for Yambo?
11. (By the way, Eco is a decided atheist.  This may affect some of your thoughts regarding the metaphors of the book and memory.  For instance, while reading I couldn't help thinking about what I believe, personally, about our "pre-existence," and how, as we don't remember living with God before birth, this might tie in somehow to Yambo's memory selectively excluding memories tied to emotion.)
12. I'd love to say that the fog of Northern Italy is legendary, but I don't know the legends.  What I do know is that my own experience with fog in Northern Italy would easily qualify as the stuff of legend!  Pea soup, even, is a modest modifier--more like damp, wool curtain, only ghostly....  Sorry.  I'll stop.
13. Metaphorically or not (just forget the diagnosis for a minute), why the lack of emotion, especially when seeing his kids and grandkids?  Does he feel remorse for not feelings nostalgic?  Is such really a source of connection to the soul?
14. "Remembering is a labor, not a luxury," and "Some one said that it acts like a convergent lens in a camera obscura: it focuses everything, and the image that results from it is much more beautiful than the original" (see number 9).