The Island of the Day Before

This was the fun kind of postmodernist novel. Not as ebullient as Calvino or Borges, but more deliberate, more focused. Clever, but not insufferably so.

The island of the day before is set in the 1630s-40s. Its frame story deals with Roberto de la Grive, minor Italian nobleman, who is shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean, but manages to end up on board of an abandoned vessel anchored between two islands. Because he can’t swim, he is confined to its decks, thus prompting him to comment he has been shipwrecked on a ship (f you like that sort of snarkiness, this book has plenty of that). Fortunately, the ship is well-stocked with food, water, a scientist’s collection of birds and plants, and a room full of clocks. Roberto settles in for a show more few weeks. In order to maintain his sanity, he starts writing letters to the girl he loves, which soon becomes a diary of sorts, which turns into his biography, which turns into a thriller of 17thC mercantile espionage.

Eco has a lot of fun with this setup, and spins it off into an astonishing diversity of chapters. Portions of the book read like a dramatic episode in the history of the city of Casale, in northern Italy, where Roberto served in his father’s army. The chapters most like a spy thriller feature Roberto’s long-lost evil twin, who may or may not be imaginary, and a supporting character from Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (which is set in the 1620s). There’s editorial chapters and asides, where an unnamed editor tries to make sense of Roberto’s writings as his state of mind deteriorates. Particularly enjoyable, I thought, were the chapters where Eco positively wallows in imitations of 17thC writings, their styles and their tropes -- I adore the exhaustive compilation of things that may be symbolized by the dove and the attempt to present all of that as one coherent idea. Finally, and, perhaps most impressively, many chapters deal with debates and conflicts from contemporary philosophy, theology and science, presented as learned discussions by experts in their respective fields. These chapters are where Eco really captured 17thC mentalities: how people thought, and why they did so, and why that adds up to a coherent worldview, dove-metaphors and all.

All of this adds up to a wonderful book that revels in its erudition and its own cleverness, and that has absolutely earned that right. It’s uneven in places -- Eco does sometimes let his obsessions go on for a tad too long -- but it’s never boring. show less

What a curious, maddening book. Certainly a great example of creative writing and, it seems to me, a brilliant piece of translating by William Weaver. It seems like Eco has used this book as a way to demonstrate his erudition ....and he does this remarkably well. What is the plot? Well it's certainly convoluted.....it purports to be the work of somebody who came across an ancient manuscript dating back to the mid 1600's. And the original author of the manuscript was ostensibly keeping something like a diary of his misfortunes....plus enough of his background and history to make a decent story: Born in Italy to minor nobility, involved in the siege of Casale where his father died, thence to Paris were he became involved in intellectual show more and subversive circles, arrested by Cardinal Richelieu for his apparent knowledge of the "powder of sympathy" and sent on a secret mission to elucidate what the English are up to (in terms of measuring longitude using this powder). Shipwrecked and washed up on the 180degree of longitude to a deserted ship......a ship with a room of clocks and a hold full of birds....and a rather maniacal Jesuit Priest who is pursuing the secret of longitude with the "specula melitensis". Because they are (according to the priest) on the meridian line the island to the left is the day before and to the right it is today....so one can go back in time!!
The island of the day before holds both the specula melitensis and a spectacular orange dove and the long boat from the deserted ship......Roberto, the author of the manuscript, and the priest being unable to swim.....the island is unattainable ...but they try in many different ways to get to it. Overlaying this narrative is a second story arising from Roberto's imagined evil twin, Ferrante, who is hell bent on destroying Roberto....and an unattainable love for Lilia in Paris. To rid himself of this imaginary evil twin, Roberto writes a story wherein Ferrante impersonates him in Paris, wins Lilia, and escapes on a twin ship to the Daphne on which Roberto is marooned. Eventually, Ferrante comes to a satisfyingly, unpleasant end. But woven into this dual tale there is speculation about; the various ways of determining latitude, whether the earth revolves around the sun or vice versa, the use of the powder of sympathy to cure wounds, then nature of time, Various medieval inventions for walking or working underwater, The nature of doves and the realm of hell...and the psychological torment and nature of jealousy of the absent lover. Eco can captivate with his writing: for example on describing the sight of coral for the first time: "He was above a garden, no, he was mistaken, now it seemed a petrified forest, and at the next moment there were mounds, folds, shores, gaps and grottoes, a single slope of living stones on which a vegetation not of this earth was composed in squat forms, or round, or scaly, that seemed to wear a granulated coat of mail, or else gnarled, or else coiled,. But, different as they were, they were all stupendous in their grace and loveliness, to such a degree that even those worked with feigned negligence, roughly shaped, displayed their roughness with majesty; they were monsters, true but monsters of beauty......
Cypress-polyps, which in their vermicular writhing revealed the rosy colour of a great central lip, stroked plantations of albino phalli with amaranth glandes; pink minnows dotted with olive grazed ashen cauliflowers sprayed with scarlet, striped tubers of blackening copper....And he could see the saffron liver of a great animal, or else an artificial fire of mercury arabesques, wisps of thorns dripping sanguine and finally a kind of chalice of flaccid mother of pearl......."
Sometimes this erudition becomes a bit "over the top" ....is he really just showing off ....or over-working his thesaurus? But whenever I went to cross check on some obscure word or reference ...they all fitted. Sometimes...I found myself getting a bit bored but he deftly swings between the various narratives to maintain the interest despite some rather wordy passages.
One thing fascinated me and that was the medieval reasoning for such things as the rotation of the planets, and what happened to the water after Noah's flood? And the importance of "devices" (such as those used on flags).
But I've always enjoyed Eco's books and this one is no exception. Five stars from me. show less

"I challenge anyone to find himself abandoned on a deserted ship, between sea and sky in a vast space, and not be ready to dream that in his great misfortune he at least has had the good fortune to stumble into the heart of time" (273).

The Island of the Day Before is a fantasy about fantasy, with a documentary conceit and no genuinely supernatural elements. Some details of the seventeenth-century science may now seem rather occult, but the essential metaphysics of the entire tale are very much of our world. It is a tale about a quest for the secret of determining longitude, and it seeks to celebrate the mystery of the antipodes in the paradoxes of an international date line.

Although this story was set a century earlier, I found it show more rather reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. Both are big beefy novels written in the waning of the 20th century, and concerned with the exploratory push of European powers (in early modernity and the Enlightenment, respectively), as well as the relationships between objective and subjective worlds. But their titles show the biggest difference between the books. Mason & Dixon has two protagonists, and the surfeit of plot (to be expected from Pynchon) concerns their relationships to each other and their world. The insular Eco novel is instead nearly solipsistic in the extent to which characters other than the protagonist Roberto are practically reduced to figments of his imagination--the plot, such as it is, is largely in his reminiscences, dreams, and eventually, composed fictions.

The book is a long one, with many short chapters, and the slow pace of the plotting makes it easy to pick up and to put down. It took me more than a month to read it through. My two favorite chapters in the book could each stand on their own, and with particular reference to my occult interests. Chapter 26, "Delights for the Ingenious: A Collection of Emblems" is a long meditation on the symbolism of doves. Chapter 37, "Paradoxical Exercises Regarding the Thinking of Stones," is a contemplative demonstration of getting stoned in line with the discussion "On the Final Will" in Liber Aleph vel CXI.

The metafictional elements are pronounced in this novel, where the principal character himself ends up writing a "romance," in which his imagined half-brother and rival becomes his alter-ego. Eco makes both the opening and the closing of the book rather disorienting and unconventional, as part of his reflection on the composition of imaginative literature, and he uses the premise of working from a discovered three-hundred-year-old manuscript both to assert and to undermine the credibility of his story. show less

The writing of Umberto Eco is always an acquired taste, but The Island of the Day Before is one that would make even experienced readers blanch. The concept is sublime: in the 1600s, a shipwrecked man is marooned on a small island which straddles the international date line. His salvation, he believes, is on another island on the horizon, on the other side of the date line: the titular 'island of the day before'. As we delve into the character of Roberto, the shipwrecked man, we are promised insight into his fears and regrets, and the prospect of the struggle to reach the island mirroring Roberto's attempts to come to terms with his past and who he is. Even avoiding any mystical time-travelling element, this promised a satisfying show more literary adventure.

Unfortunately, it never quite pans out like that. Early attempts to subvert the tropes of nautical adventures and Robinsonades are abandoned in favour of a surprisingly dull backstory of a castle siege and a convoluted, Dumas-like romance surrounding Roberto's make-believe twin brother Ferrante. The book also indulges a bit too heartily in its academic digressions. They're largely redundant digressions at that, being concerned largely with matters of longitude (in the days before Harrison's chronometer), Catholic theological debates and 17th-century cosmology.

Such erudite digressions are a regular characteristic of this author, of course, and it can seem wrong to criticise them. But in better books (namely The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum) they are balanced out by a slim but clear plotline. This never emerges in Island; we slip in and out of Roberto's train of thought, never really getting a handle on the character or his goals. What the Island is meant to represent becomes increasingly elusive until, fatigued by all the dry abstractions, the reader loses all interest in it. The concept, however compelling, is never fully utilised, and the reader's growing disappointment at this becomes an increasingly dogged endurance battle against what remains.

For what remains is 500+ pages of redundant digressions loosely tethered to a slight plot. Of the book's ideas I have little to say, for the currents of The Island of the Day Before remain mired in all its miscellanea. Other reviewers have praised the quality of the writing, but I found it to be too much of that poetic mud that many readers get their wheels stuck in. It's not only the indulgence of archaic trivia – expected of Eco – but a flurry of florid similes; every great line ("a reddish cloud suddenly cast between ship and sky a bloody shadow as if, up above, they had slaughtered the Horses of the Sun" (pg. 460)) is outnumbered by one of dense, ineffectual meandering by a factor of twenty. Eco's erudition can be enjoyable (see, for example, those two other titles of his I mentioned), but his verbosity and the death-hand it places on the pace of this particular story sucks much of that enjoyment away. In a story with inadequate plot, such prose is fatal. show less

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 show more 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… show less

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 show more 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. show less

This book has been on my shelf for a very long time, and while I couldn't quite get into it, I also couldn't get rid of it - waiting for that elusive 'Someday' to read it. When I first learned of Do Nothing but Read Day at The Green Dragon, I decided that this would be the book for that day. Fortunately, I planned to take two days. And I used both of them.

It is not a rollicking adventure in the vein of Baudolino or a mystery as In The Name of the Rose. The physical adventure of being shipwrecked on an anchored ship is mitigated by the total indolence of the protagonist. He is entirely self-centered and while not unintelligent, disinclined to keep his thoughts at any matter at hand. It's a fantastic conceit, as it leaves scads of room show more for the narrator of the story room to ponder, to consider, to teach and to be confused.

It is the brilliance of Umberto Eco (and his translator, William Weaver) that allow the joy of language to carry the story that isn't even really a story through every one of its movements and mini-treatises on intellectual trends. It is something that intrigues me - how content Eco seems to be to explore the thought of different ages fully and completely in his novels, choosing adventures that are entirely plausible (though rarely probably) in the time of the story.

This is not a book that will appeal to every reader. Even those who enjoy long books may not enjoy this book, as it is not only lengthy but incredibly dense - it is joyful density, but that does not make it any easier to read. I think I read it too quickly, but now that I've read it, I am happy to read through it in pieces again and again. show less