The Island Of The Day Before
NEW––BroDart Dust Jacket Cover
Author: Umberto Eco
A Helen And Kurt Wolff Book/First U.S. Edition
Harcourt Brace & Company
©1995 Harcourt Brace & Company
CAB Comment––Umberto Eco is one of those writers that once you start reading one of his novels you are quite certain the man must know everything about everything, and “The Island Of The Day Before” is no exception. Is it an amazing book? Yes. Is it a wild almost lunatic trip? Yes. Will you have to actually use your brain to grasp the mind blowing aspects, which are many? Absolutely. As with my reading of Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, “The Island Of The Day Before” also served to galvanize and excite my desire to incorporate history and deeper philosophy onto my own writing––“Puzzleman”, “A Catch In Time”, and my upcoming novel “Heather’s Treehouse” (Spring 2020). Again I have to admit that Umberto Eco isn’t for everyone; he isn’t light, fluffy mindless entertainment––not by a long shot––but his writing has a definite “wow factor” and is worth the effort.
“The Island Of The Day Before”––Kirkus Reviews:
“An imaginative romance of shipwreck, survival, and philosophical adventuring by the formidably learned author of The Name of the Rose (1983), Foucault's Pendulum (1989), and, most recently, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (1994). In 1643, highborn Roberto della Griva, a soldier who has fought in the Thirty Years' War and subsequently been sent on a secret mission to the Antipodes, is shipwrecked in the South Pacific somewhere near the Fiji and Solomon Islands. He saves himself by clambering aboard another ship the abandoned Daphne. Finding in its hold sufficient provisions and supplies, and gradually recovering his strength and his wits, Roberto records the events of his past life his sheltered boyhood in Italy, confused exposure to the temporal claims of political allegiance, love of learning for its own sake, and sobering experience as devoted postulant to his scarcely approachable love objects. The tale of Roberto then is juxtaposed against his cautious exploration of the Daphne now, climaxing in the surprising fulfillment of his fears that the ``intruder'' whose companion presence he suspects may be the ``evil twin brother'' he has always had fantasies of. Simultaneously, a nameless omniscient narrator summarizes the record Roberto has left behind, ruefully assessing the latter's amazed discovery that the complexity of creation proves all things possible including the contrary lives led by our alternative selves. Eco tests his readers severely, especially in detailed considerations of the mechanics of navigation and ``the mystery of longitude.'' Yet even this novel's denser arcana are embodied in vivid characters speaking lively and funny dialogue. Prominent among Roberto's reality instructors are his genially blasphemous and metaphysically-minded father, inventor of an Aristotelian Memory Machine; his aphorism-spouting comrade-in-arms Saint-Savin; and the alarmingly polymathic scientist-priest, Father Caspar Wanderdrossel. Though weighted here and there by the longueurs of whimsy, this is on balance an intriguing and entertaining theoretical romp, a kind of Borgesian Robinson Crusoe.”c
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