The Island of the Day Before - Hardcover

Umberto Eco

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151001510 ISBN 13: 9780151001514

Publisher: Harcourt Brace, 1995

Synopsis

The author of The Name of the Rose presents a panoramic historical novel, set in the seventeenth century, about a young aristocrat who goes to sea to find love and an old Jesuit with a boundless scientific knowledge. 300,000 first printing. $250,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Umberto Eco is professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.

Reviews

In this tale of an Italian nobleman shipwrecked in the South Pacific in 1643, Eco's storytelling abilities and his love for esoteric historical detail, so beautifully balanced in The Name of the Rose, are sadly out of kilter, with the arcana overwhelming the plot. As part of a cabal instigated by French Cardinal Mazarin and his protege Colbert, Robert della Griva has been traveling in disguise on an English ship whose mission is to discover the Punto Fijo, the means by which navigators can plumb "the mystery of longitude." Cast adrift during a storm, Roberto fetches up against another ship, the Daphne, whose crew has mysteriously vanished. Although the vessel is moored only a mile from an enchanting island (the two may be on opposite sides of the date line, giving the book its title), Roberto, a nonswimmer, is as marooned as though in mid-ocean. The text consists of a third-person narrator's retelling of Roberto's manuscript recounting his adventures on the ship and such previous experiences as his participation in the siege of Casale and life among the erudite of Paris. There are some magical descriptions of Roberto's moonlit solitude aboard the Daphne, but the introduction of a third story line involving his imaginary evil twin hopelessly tangles a narrative already overloaded with lengthy exegeses on such obscure 17th-century devices as the Powder of Sympathy and the Specula Melitensis. Eco's postmodernist games?he directly addresses the reader, explaining how little the narrator knows?wear thin, and some delightfully secondary characters who appear too briefly only remind us how unfocused the novel is. Perhaps Eco himself was aware of the novel's faults when writing it?for his narrator criticizes Roberto's tale as "narrating so many stories at once that at a certain point it becomes difficult to pick up the thread." Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

How baffling and dangerous sea travel was before the invention of longitude. How precious this discovery would have been to rival nations with global ambitions, such as Holland, France, Spain, and England. Why, it was the arms race of the Renaissance! And, Eco suggests, the holy grail for spies, including the dreamy young hero of this imaginative novel, Roberto della Griva. We first meet Roberto in what we learn is a typically ludicrous situation. Shipwrecked in the South Pacific, he finds refuge not on land, but on an oddly outfitted and mysteriously abandoned ship. Roberto quickly settles into an indulgent routine of writing highly romanticized love letters and imbibing large quantities of aqua vitae, but he regains clarity of mind just often enough to realize that he isn't alone after all. His elusive shipmate turns out to be Father Caspar, a brilliant man who has unlocked the very secrets of time and distance that Roberto was supposed to secure. As Roberto and Caspar conduct experiments and attempt to reach a nearby island, we learn the story of Roberto's life, a captivating tale that features delightfully blasphemous intellectuals and amusing speculation on the absurdity of the Thirty Years' War and the consequences of the rise of scientific thought in a world dominated by politicized religion. After the somewhat heavy-handed Foucault's Pendulum (1989), Eco has returned to the sort of erudite humor, suspense, stimulating philosophy, and cunning wordplay that made The Name of the Rose (1983) so popular. And, once again, translator William Weaver has done a superb job. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt Brace
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151001510
• ISBN 13: 9780151001514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 513