What do You think about The Island Of The Day Before (2006)?
There is too much philosophizing and painstaking narration which can weigh down the interest, though I must say that the prose is often imaginative. There are loads of awesome description and amusing digression (on astronomy, physics, Christianity). Eco’s agility as a storyteller is evident from his skillful juggling of scientific, historical, and philosophical ideas.Eco luxuriates in lyrical language. His sentences are laden with details. The passages can be impressive for the sheer velocity of action, but the narrative somehow lacks a door latch that the reader can hold onto. I feel at first like a blind bat in need of the powers of echolocation. Like the main character Roberto, I feel shipwrecked myself.The book explores some of the foundations of scientific thought, and most of it is presented as a drivel by Father Caspar (in the manner of Master Yoda), who doggedly adheres to the geocentric view that the Earth is the center of the universe. There are already indications of the nascent thinking of Copernicus, Einstein’s relativity postulates especially on the frame of reference, and some hints of present-day debates on intelligent design and creationism.The book in parts is, to mimic its double-edged mannerism, technically exasperating or exasperatingly technical. What is exasperating is that the science is outdated. But that is what is partly admirable with it. I like the way Eco attempts to role-play arguments of mad philosophers and mad scientists (they seem to be interchangeable here).Eco seems to be documenting the naiveté in scientific thinking and approaches in 17th century. Religion is suggested as the culprit in contaminating the progress of astronomy and natural sciences. Indirectly, the absurdity of religion influences scientific methods and approaches. Religion kills the objectivity of science and yet it propels it to invention, experimentation, and discovery.At the literary level, the novel has many to offer. The playfulness of the free indirect style, the use of doppelgänger (in some ways, the questing reader is the double), the (slightly) intrusive narrator who presumably wrote the novel as an ‘interpretation’ of Roberto’s writings, and then there's the open-ended conclusion. It has something to say about time, the nature of time, the direction of time, the arbitrariness of scientific theories, the subjectivity of science. For a book about “emblems and devices” it has masterfully crafted symbols, most notably the Orange Dove and the unattainable Island itself.Overall The Island of the Day Before is impressive not so much for the writing (which is often boring), but for the ambition (which is vaulting). It has moments and passages that come alive like quasars and pulsars. It is, in some ways, a tropical novel of sunlight, as opposed to the dreary old-fashioned novel bathed in Gothic darkness, although it is old-fashioned, perennially old-fashioned.
—Ryan
I really wanted to like this book. While I'm not a big fan of Eco's books, I somehow seem to collect them, nonetheless. The premise wowed me, the cover art is righteous...and yet. And yet. The main character drove me crazy, Hamlet-style. He reminded me of the fear mongers who work 9-5 jobs, but never leave their unhappy jobs and go through life blaming others. It's like driving in the slow lane, even though all the other lanes are empty, and then getting unhappy because the slow lane is bumper-to-bumper. Do something! Eco is a very intelligent writer, perhaps too intelligent for moi. Try I did, but success eluded me. Instead, I felt like Tantalus, with the grapes always eluding my grasp, the water always receding. Sadness envelops me, not worthy of Umberto. Me sorry!Book Season = Summer (island of cerveza)
—GoldGato
Readers expect Umberto Eco to take them on a stimulating journey of discovery as his characters unravel mysteries that take them to the heart of early Western civilisation. In The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum this style worked brilliantly. In the 'The Island of the Day Before' it fails catastrophically.Eco spends hundreds of pages wallowing in his arcane knowledge, resorting to ever more desperate ploys to show off his learning, because this book has no plot to draw out those intellectual diversions naturally. In his previous novels, the basic murder mysteries provided a focus for the reader's journey: there was a mystery to be solved, and Eco's digressions enlightened the journey. Here the trek can be focused on one thing only: the long hoped-for last page, and the reader is only sustained by the morbid fascination of whether anything interesting is really going to happen. It doesn't.Very early on, our hero finds himself stuck on an abandoned ship off an uncharted island. His plight becomes a metaphor for that of the reader, trapped in Eco's ego with no hope of escape. I have a degree in Medieval Literature and History, but I can't find much of interest here. What hope is there for the more general reader? Never have I fallen asleep so often over a book, pummelled into intellectual insensibility.
—Patrick Neylan
