YMMV / The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

• Awesome Art: The illustrations of 1930s comics, magazines, and propaganda and rendering of Yambo's dying visions add a lot to the narrative.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When Yambo goes to Solara, one of the first things he does is go out back to the vineyard and takes a dump. He then proceeds to look at the results while expounding on the personal and private virtues of it.
• Ending Fatigue: The last forty pages or so dive straight into Gainax Ending territory without really resolving anything.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Sibella pranks Yambo by putting an fake entry of an under-priced Shakespeare's First Folio in the inventory records. He panics and fumes for about a page before Sibella starts laughing. Cut to the last part of the second section in the story, when Yambo finds a real First Folio in Solara, and promptly has a heart attack. It's possible that he's dying throughout the last third of the book.
  • Young Yambo nurses his hopeless crush on Lila, even giving her a spare seat in front of him during the showing of Cyrano de Bergerac. He spends the play staring at the back of her neck, pining away in his usual, slightly pathetic way. Several decades and the onset of amnesia later, and Yambo can only remember what she looks like from behind. He spends the last section of the book desperately trying to remember her face, and ultimately fails.
  • The In-Universe reaction Yambo has to the various propaganda and racist comics from his childhood.
• Nightmare Fuel: The entire ending, with Yambo's dying visions. He doesn't know who he is or how much of anything is real, and he sees a long, garish procession of all his childhood acquaintances and comic book characters, including a dead Gragnola with a brace to support his slit throat. He's then transported back in time to Lila's foyer in what seems like a second chance to proclaim his love. Before he can, the sun turns black.
• Paranoia Fuel: World War II-era Italy was rife with this. Say the wrong thing, be affiliated with the wrong political party, take in refugees, and you - and your town - may not survive the night.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general reaction to it. Even the review on Umberto Eco's official website gives it a lukewarm response at best.
• Values Dissonance: Yambo is bitterly aware of how the Fascist Italy-era propaganda looks from a modern perspective.