Umberto Eco "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"

Very often, fiction writers don't really, consciously know what they are writing about until after it's on paper. It may be something they have been unable to face in real life. The newest book by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco -- author of such acclaimed books as Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose -- is about a man, about his age, who awakens from a coma with a peculiar form of amnesia. Yambo can remember everything he's ever read, but can't remember a thing about himself. So he begins to try and rebuild his memories, using a house full of memorabilia. Eco says he did not consciously write The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana from a fear of losing his own memory. But after he finished it he realized that was exactly what he had done.