Over several weeks, he attempts to ameliorate his plight by obsessive reading and rereading—reproducing various images for his readers as if these sufficed to make the web of allusions hanging in his past alive for us, too.

“Yambo,” he tells himself, “your memory is made of paper. Not of neurons, but of pages.”

We do not doubt it. The novel offers an interesting allegory of the twentieth-century reader defamiliarized from his culture, attempting to reassemble his history and life.

The question is whether this cry can attain the pathos at which it aims, particularly given what it says about the one who cries it. The novel’s characters are not real characters but a mad archivist’s pastiche; and while this is the book’s greatest weakness, it is also a crucial part of its philosophical ambitions.

Eco has taken it upon himself to dramatize texts’ suggestions about the postmodern subject who has absorbed high and low—Vergil, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, comic books, and Fascist propaganda—all in one breath. The question is how much we can care about a protagonist who, in the course of 450 pages, does little but indulge in his ruminations.

This is less an “open work”—or opera aperta, to use a phrase Eco has embraced in his academic work—than a loose ended and formless one. Its diversions do offer small delights. (I was tickled to recognize a Marlene Dietrich song Eco had planted in the text. He replaced the lyrics with Latin, and it actually fits the tune: “duae umbrae nobis una facta sunt, infra laternam stabimus, olim lil marleen, olim lili marleen.”)

But this cannot, ultimately, sustain a novel. It unravels in the final section in a way that creates less mystery than confusion—and, frankly, boredom.

Ronald Knox, the celebrated British mystery writer and author of the “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” (1929) concluded those commandments with the following: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.”

It is safe to assume, given the scope of his learning, that Eco had Knox’s precepts in mind when he composed this novel. I just am not sure that he duly prepped us to be invested in a character who does little but meander through Eco’s own favorites.

—Staff writer Moira G. Weigel can be reached at weigel@fas.harvard.edu.