The Island of the Day Before (1994)

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 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. ( )

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Not as weird as the title suggests. This is mostly i guess a fictional historical biography, set in the 17th century. Very highbrow, lot of words you'll need to look up. About half of it is flashback and another large chunk is a story the protagonist is writing. A lot of it is just conversations and thoughts. A bit like Moby Dick in its continuous digressions from what one might think of as the story. However while it is a little boring in places its VERY well written. I liked.
oh and a hat-tip to the translator this must have been a hell of a job. ( )

Closer to 2.5. Just didn’t really enjoy it that much. ( )

I gave this one 4 stars because it really is a mind expanding read. A work of fiction within a work of fiction. Lots of digressions on philosophy and other things. ( )