The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Ecotrans. Geoffrey BrockHarcourt, 2005

Yambo wakes in a fog: he’s lost his episodic memory, though his semantic memory remains. He speaks in stock phrases and quotations; he remembers lines of poetry but not his own life. And so he returns to his childhood country house to try to remember who he is, digging through boxes of notebooks, records, and comic books from the 1930s and ’40s in the process. This book is pleasingly allusive, and smart, and full of books (Yambo’s a rare-book dealer who has always loved to read), but it sometimes feels over-explained, and when Yambo revisits the plot of one comic book after another, the novel drags.