»How Not To Use the Cellular Telephone

Umberto Eco's essay on How not to use the cellular telephone springs to mind whenever I think about how sensitive I am to the buzzing slab of metal in my pocket, to the chirp of the pager on my belt, to the ringing of a bluetooth headset. Thanks to Amazon for providing the searchable text and scanned pages of How to travel with a salmon, his excellent and hilarious collection of essays.

I was a little surprised to see that his latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, does not appear in English translation by the formidable William Weaver. The subject puts me off, too: an apparently-trendy work in which the protagonist loses his personal memory, but remembers exactly each comic book, novel, and printed word he has read. The work unfolds partly as a graphic novel. Although neither the cultural synthesis nor collage-like accumulation of information is foreign to Eco's novels, the modernity rubs me the wrong way. Eco has written about memory and isolation before, in both The Island of the Day Before and in Foucault's Pendulum.