The Island of the Day Before (original 1994; edition 2006)

Okay. Finished another Eco book. Unsatisfied, again. Brilliant and beautiful writer that takes you in circle after circle after circle after circle until you arrive finally at - nowhere. I did not find it difficult to read as many reviewers have mentioned (except sometimes the broken and halting German/English that the Jesuit spoke) nor did I find problems in the translation from the original Italian. Eco writes masterfully. As I've mentioned in a previous Eco review, if you have hours upon hours to spend simply to be taken away into a world of words and ideas without any expectation of "resolution" then Eco is the writer for you. I understand "The Name of the Rose" is good but I can't imagine offering myself up to Eco again. I'd probably find more gain simply browsing a thesaurus as a thesaurus provides more "closure" to its tale. After 1,200 pages, I am cured of Eco. ( )

The Island of the Day Before is by content, form and intention a historical novels, and yet is is quite different from most (or possibly any) historical novels you might have read. From Walter Scott’s Waverly onwards, historical fiction has aimed to either give a close-up view of important historical events and personalities, or else to paint a vivid picture of what life in a certain period was like, to bring the past back to life in the reader’s imagination. (Note: I’m aware that this is a simplification, but I think you’ll find that the vast majority of historical fiction – which is, after all, a very popular genre – can be subsumed under one of those two main categories.) Eco’s novel, on the other hand, does something quite different instead; it does not attempt to depict the life in his chosen period (roughly the middle of the seventeenth century), does not really concern itself much with its physical reality at all, but instead describes the period’s ideas, or more precisely, the way those ideas structured and ordered the worldview of its contemporaries.

This might be seen as a continuation of the debate with the early work of Michel Foucault that was central to Eco’s previous novel, Foucault’s Pendulum (and, yes, I’m aware that the Foucault referenced in that title is not the 20th-century French philosopher… except that, in a way, he is). It would certainly be possible to argue that The Island of the Day Before aims for a description of the Baroque épisteme (not unlike Peter Greenaway’s movie The Draughtsman’s Contract, to which Eco’s novel indeed does bear some similarities), although I personally feel more inclined to see the influence of Hans Blumenberg at work here, in particularly the short but utterly brilliant and eminently read-worthy Shipwreck with Spectator.

It’s not quite correct to say that The Island of the Before describes a certain historical view of the world, though - that is what Foucault and Blumenberg did, being philosophers. Eco, being a novelist (or at least wearing his novelist’s hat here, although Eco the semiologist definitely has the occasional cameo appearance), rather embodies it: The Island of the Day Before is just the kind of huge, sprawling, colourful, digressive, funny, erudite monster of a narrative that Baroque authors (and, one assumes, readers) so loved. In contrast to Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Eco does not attempt to get at the heart of what the period was about by way of (more or less) realistic mimesitic narrative, by basically writing a 19th-century novel about the 17th century, but by having his novel become a 17th novel instead (which is, of course, and quite ironically, very much a 20th century maneuvre), and indeed suceeds where Stephenson fails.

This is not a novel of surprising plots twists, then (although what plot there is does twist quite a bit, and there are some surprises along the way, too), nor a novel of deep characterisation (although it is populated by some rather fascinating characters), nor a novel of lavish descriptions (although – as much as I was able to judge this, reading a translation – the prose seems quite wonderful, moving with ease between a drier, reticient style and the exuberance of Baroque pastiche), but it is first and foremost a novel of ideas, and is likely to appeal most to readers who are intellectually curious, who like to be served some cerebral meat to sink their mind’s teeth into (my apologies for the metaphor) and enjoy exploring concepts, following them down to their last ramifications. Or else academics.

Thomas Mann, the undisputed master of the novel of ideas, is indeed another huge influence here; Roberto reminded me more than once of Hans Castorp, the siege of Casale reads almost like a Baroque version of the Zauberberg, including its own versions of Naphta and Settembrini, and Wanderdrossel’d dialogue sounds (at least in the German translation) uncannily like the devil in Doktor Faustus. All this juggling of influences and proliferation of references (of which I have barely scratched the surface here) is by no means gratuitous but is very distintive for the literature of the period that prided itself on its erudition (while today’s authors, one often feels, tend to be rather embarrassed by it, unless it is pop culture they are referencing to).

All of this might give one the impression that The Island of the Day Before is basically a faux-Baroque novel, a mere pastiche of period literature, but that would very misleading. True, there is a Baroque novel at the hear of Eco’s – but the reader gets to see it only in brief glimpses. Because the book does not present us with Roberto’s chronicle of events, but instead with a chronicle of that chronicle, done by a narrator who is probably the most fascinating and enigmatic character to appear here. I found it very hard to place him in a definite period – while there is never a doubt that he is to be situated some time after Roberto, it never becomes quite clear as to how much afterwards. Early in the novel, the narrator analyses Roberto’s character in terms of the Four Temperaments and their associated humours which would lead one to believe that he must be almost contemporary with Roberto. But near the novel’s end, he mentions Hollywood, which would place him in the 20th century at the earliest. This is never explicitely resolved, and it is left to the reader to make sense of it; my own theory is that the narrator actually evolves during the course of the novel and is not the same at the end as he was at the beginning, and that this development is accompanied by that of the narrative strategies he employs and which seem to increasingly take a turn towards the modern as the novel progresses. But there are doubtlessly other explanations for this, and maybe I just imagined something which is not really there at all…

Umberto Eco was born January 5, 1932 and is a Knight Grand Cross of the Italian Republic. He is the founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione at the University of San Marino, an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford, and is best known for his novels The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery. He is also President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici at the University of Bologna, and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. In addition to fiction, he has also written both academic texts on literary theory and children's books.

William Weaver is best known for his translations of Umberto Eco and Italio Calvino. He has been translating Italian authors for over fifty years. He also works as a critic and commentator for the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. Weaver was a professor at Bard College in New York, and was a Bard Center Fellow. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Leicester in the UK, and Trinity College in addition to his postgraduate study at the University of Rome, and his B.A. from Princeton University. He has several original works mainly revolving around the librettos of Verdi and Puccini.

Ouch!

Disclaimer! My brain hurts, and I will admit that it took me a bit to get interested in The Island of the Day Before. However, after I realized that my constant companion while reading this book would be a dictionary, the book became much more intriguing. The problem, truthfully, is that not only is the writing very deep and complex, but it is also originally in Italian. So, the English translation is a little hard to grasp at times. In addition, the novel isn’t really what I thought it would be: an adventure to an island of the day before, as the title implies. Rather, it is more of a philosophical introspection.

Reading a Journal

The Island of the Day Before is Eco’s third novel, and focuses on a 17th century Italian nobleman, Roberto della Griva, who is the sole survivor of a terrible stormy gale. He becomes marooned on an island, and can see an island that is in the distance which he is convinced is on the other side of the International Date Line. Roberto wants to visit it, as he believes going to the island will fix all his woes. But, he is deathly afraid to swim to it.

Shipwrecked and swept from his ship, the Amaryllis, he manages to pull himself aboard the fully provisioned ship Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. Della Griva goes through a series of flashbacks of a metacognitive nature. The ship is eerily quiet, as if the entire crew fled some terrible specter. We, the reader, get to view Roberto’s journey through the eyes of a modern narrator who has found della Griva’s journal on board the derelict ship. Through the narrator’s eyes, we see Roberto as he questions truth, reality, and the overall meaning of life.

“From the way he recalls it on the Daphne, I tend to believe that at Casale, while he lost both his father and himself in a war of too many meanings and of no meaning at all, Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond which there was no longer an Author; or if there was, He seemed lost in the remaking of Himself from too many perspectives. If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of perimeters, here he felt himself truly in the most extreme and most lost of peripheries, because, if there was a center, it lay before him, and he was its immobile satellite” (145-146).

We can also hear of loves lost through some guile on the part of another,

“Oh Love, Love, Love, have you not punished me enough already, is this not a death undying?” (385).

The loss of love is merely one of the finer points of life that Eco gets to discuss through this novel, and he talks about it in a truly poetic way. Love can punish more than a simple death, as it is an ongoing process. Death is but once; the loss of a love is revisited time and time again in painful agony.

Semiotics

Umberto Eco is a big fan of semiotics – the study of signs in language. Eco seems particularly fond of the specific part of semiotics called pragmatics, the study of signs and the effects they have on the people who use them. Eco even takes the liberty within his novel to educate the reader on semiotics. He talks to the reader directly about the plot, not as the narrator, but instead as Umberto Eco himself.

“So we may assume that gradually, perhaps through the therapeutic action of that balmy air or that sea water, Robert was cured of a complaint that, real or imagined, had turned him into a lycanthrope for more than ten months (unless the reader chooses to insinuate that because from now on I need him on deck full-time, and finding no contradiction among his papers, I am freeing him from all illness, with authorial arrogance)” (280).

A Work in a Work

Eco seems to love blurring his fictional writing with a dialogue in reality as well. While extremely confusing at the time, his references to other works of fiction are rather refreshing. And, of course, what better fiction to reference than his own, such as the notes of Adso of Melk from The Name of the Rose (played by Christian Slater in the movie version of the novel)?

“For the captain it was obvious that the books, having belonged to a plague victim, were agents of infection. The plague is transmitted, as everyone knows, through venenific unguents, and he had read of people who died by wetting a finger with saliva as they leafed through works whose pages had in fact been smeared with a poison” (248).

For those that don’t know, in The Name of the Rose, the pages of a journal were poisoned, so that those who read it, and turn the pages by licking their fingers are killed. The canadian rock group Arcade Fire even references the famed passage in the song Neon Bible.

"Take the poison of your age / Don't lick your fingers when you turn the page"

I also found references to The Man in the Iron Mask and The Three Musketeers in the novel. It certainly seems like Eco wants to educate the reader in general works of fiction as he writes.

Space, Time, and Beauty

One of the larger themes in the novel is the concept of time. Is time able to be manipulated, or is it constant? Can one travel to the day before? Roberto is convinced that his troubles will end if only he could travel to the day before. He would no longer find himself marooned, and would no longer be forced to boringly reminisce about his past life. But, the island in the distance seemingly moves farther away from him.

“Indeed, as he sees it distant not only in space but also (backwards) in time, from this moment on, whenever he mentions that distance, Roberto seems to confuse space and time, and he writes, ‘The bay, alas, is too yesterday,’ and ,’How much sea separates me from the day barely ended,’ and even, ‘Threatening rainclouds are coming from the Island, whereas today it is already clear . . . . But if the Island moves ever farther away, is it still worth the effort to learn to reach it?’” (362).

This quote encapsulates for me the beauty of this novel. While there is much to be discussed in the way of academia, semiotics, and the like, his poetic writing is what makes the novel simply great to read. Eco blends his poetic hand with some terribly mind-bending concepts. The Island of the Day Before is truly beautifully written, and Eco’s expert prose makes it fly off the page. The tome is incredibly thought provoking and it forces the reader to think about the finer things in life.

Although The Island of the Day Before is hard to read, if you have some resilience and a dictionary, I strongly recommend you read it.

Originally Posted At: wherepenmeetspaper.blogspot.com ( )

loved the anachronistic head space shifting ( )

This book is translated from the Italian title of L'isola del giorno prima. I bought this on a whim at an eclectic bookstore called the Tattered Cover in Denver, CO. I had read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco when I was in high school but I hadn’t picked up any of his other works since.

In this book, the main character, Roberto, must deal with his mysterious stranding on a ship that is tantalizingly close to an island offering refuge. Unfortunately, Roberto can’t swim. The author’s juxtaposition of real life events with the fantastical period on the ship adds a dream-like quality to a great portion of the story.

Large parts of the book attempt to explain Roberto’s situation through a series of flashbacks relating his role in the battles of Casale, the loss of his father, his unrequited love for Lilia and his suspicion of an imaginary evil brother he names Ferrante. Towards the end of the book, Roberto attempts to provide solace to himself in writing a novel explaining how Ferrante lead to his demise through attempts to steal Lilia and ruin him politically. Roberto received a serious head wound during the war. This injury combined with his confusion between space and time, his paranoid schizophrenic behavior during his time on the ship and his inability to separate reality from fantasy leads the reader to believe the main character suffered from a serious mental illness.

The book is also a treatise on topics that were popular during the Age of Reason including: astronomy, navigation, cartography, medicine, mechanics and the scientific method. These descriptions, such as the dissertation on the difficulty in calculating longitude and its importance in navigation, receive numerous paragraphs of intricate details. Roberto also entwines the poetic. For example, his lengthy narrative regarding time includes a passage about clocks that reads, in part, “those cogged wheels that shredded the day into bits of instants and consumed life in a music of death.” While the information doesn’t further the story, it adds to the overall lushness and fabric of detail that makes this book interesting.

The title of the book arises from the conflict between the science of navigation and how we define “time.” Should Roberto be able to swim from the ship on which he is stranded to the nearby island, he would cross the International Date Line and we would essentially arrive at the island the “day before.” The book ends with Roberto’s final attempt to reach that island with no mention to his achievement of that goal. ( )