The Island of the Day Before

Rating:
Summary: Umberto Eco is smarter than you...
Review: ...I can say that with near certainty. His professional field is the esoteric world of semiotics, or basically the science and philosophy of symbols - the same sort of thing that Dan Brown called "symbology" in his pathetic novels. That being said, it's easy to see in Eco's writing an intense affection for mystery, for illusion, for double and treble meanings, for duplicity, for hairpin turn endings. "The Island..." tells two stories, one of a young man's meandering life through the pitfalls of a Renaissance existence, and the other the surreal set piece of a man, suddenly awakening on a stranded ship, with a strange island in the distance. He doesn't know how he got there, where he is, or how to get home. Either of these tales might make really entertaining novellas, but these two odd birds are joined at the hip by making the main character the same man. And to confuse us more, we segue back and forth between the stories, keeping us always off balance slightly. About two thirds of the way through, it simply became more work than it was worth to hang on to this heeling ship of a novel, but I plowed ahead to the ending, eager for the release.

If all this makes it sound like a wasted reading experience, I assure you it wasn't. Very few people can put you in the past quite as effectively as Eco (Patrick O'Brian can actually do it better) and I saw this world in such vivid color it nearly made me blink. I didn't have to invent faces or accents for the characters, they leapt off the page. Eco's writing is luxuriant, erudite, expansive - you will either learn a lot of new words or quit looking them up after a while - and I can't imagine a better read to really take you completely out of your present existence and plunk you down someplace entirely new and very strange, much like our protagonist found himself. It's just that, for all the sound and fury, not a lot seems to really happen, and at the end of the day I felt that I wanted something that wasn't there. Perfect vacation or travel-time reading.

Rating:
Summary: One of the most disappointing books I have ever read.
Review: After reading The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, I could barely wait to get my hands on The Island of the Day Before. However, I was sadly disappointed. Having read other books by Eco, many of the philosophical meanderings contained in the text were not unexpected. But unlike his previous works, many of the long-winded descriptions of philosophy, scientific thought and theology in this text felt out of place. Rather than contributing to the plot, as they did in Eco's previous novels, they simply served to slow down the pace of the novel and leave the reader trying to remember what the book was about in the first place.

Rating:
Summary: Prose Perfected
Review: Although Umberto Eco began wonderfully with "The Name of the Rose," "The Island of the Day Before" is truly his crowning achievement. There are few books where the prose so perfectly transcends the plot that the end result is the purified, refined pleasure of reading beautifully crafted writing. I found my self reading and rereading passages of no importance simply because the play of language was so immaculate. If you are looking for the mystery and excitement of "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum," look elsewhere, but if you want to read an example of the finest fiction this century has to offer, this book is as good as it gets.

Rating:
Summary: the Land of the Dead
Review: At some point, nearing the end of the novel, someone arrives in the Land of Dead where souls suffer by deteriorating at infinitely slow rates and not having the ability to cease to exist completely. This is a pretty decent metaphor for how I felt approaching the last 100 pages of this book.

I am someone who absolutely loved both "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" and I, naturally, expected more of the same. If you're like me, you will not find it here. Maybe about 20% of the book is genuinely enjoyable, and it offers some juicy tid-bits thrown in that are only appreciable by people intimately familiar with "The Three Musketeers," which, fortunately, I am. As for the rest, I often caught myself asking "Why am I still reading this?" For all my earnest suffering and faith, there was no payoff in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Prose, Although Unnecessarily Pretentious
Review: I *love* Umberto Eco. Not just his popular works, but his articles. Here's a guy who loves writing, and he knows how to show it. He's erudite, but usually he can use his erudition to write entertaining yarns, even when writing short stories (his "pastiches") or scholarly articles.

Here we have, though, a novel that would have fared better as a monography or a collection of articles. The ideas become the main characters of the work, but a novel is supposed to be entertaining, and a novel where the characters exist only as vehicles to express certain ideas becomes a chore to read--unless one is truly fascinated by the ideas per se.

What Eco seems to be trying, though, is not to examine medieval ideas from our point of view, but to get into the head of the main character and see the world through the eyes of a person who lived in those times. Needless to say, all these ideas happen to be tied in with theological considerations that are, for the most part (and thankfully) not too relevant to the modern linguist, and perhaps not even to the modern medievalist.

All in all, it's a book worthy of a careful read, but it fails where "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" delivered: it's just not entertaining. Get it from your local library.

PS: The translation is excellent. I'd dare to say the English version is as good as the Italian original.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to Eco's par...
Review: I found the premise of this book to be very intriguing! It made me very interested in the philosophical idea of the antipodes and the search for understanding longitude. In fact, if you have read Dava Sovel's "Longitude," many of the absurd methods Eco discusses in this book for possibilities to find longitude were actually mentioned in Sovel's book as being real. The race for longitude could be comparable to the race to harness nuclear energy.

Roberto's vivid imagination and his ability to make imagination reality is machinery that is used again in Baldolino, with better success. Like I said the premise of the book was great, and could have lead to a great book, but the ending was certainly lacking. By the end it did not have the momentum to go anywhere and therefore fizzled out into monotony. It is missing the great mystery that fueled The Name of the Rose through its last pages.

This book took me at least two years of periodic reading and it was by pure will to complete the book that I did finish it. And when I did, I felt that I had wasted my time. Stick to The Name of the Rose and Bauldolino instead.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to Eco's par...
Review: I found the premise of this book to be very intriguing! It made me very interested in the philosophical idea of the antipodes and the search for understanding longitude. In fact, if you have read Dava Sovel's "Longitude," many of the absurd methods Eco discusses in this book for possibilities to find longitude were actually mentioned in Sovel's book as being real. The race for longitude could be comparable to the race to harness nuclear energy.

Roberto's vivid imagination and his ability to make imagination reality is machinery that is used again in Baldolino, with better success. Like I said the premise of the book was great, and could have lead to a great book, but the ending was certainly lacking. By the end it did not have the momentum to go anywhere and therefore fizzled out into monotony. It is missing the great mystery that fueled The Name of the Rose through its last pages.

This book took me at least two years of periodic reading and it was by pure will to complete the book that I did finish it. And when I did, I felt that I had wasted my time. Stick to The Name of the Rose and Bauldolino instead.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to standard
Review: I loved "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum," but this one left me cold. It just didn't seem to hold all the twists and depth of the others.

Rating:
Summary: Outrageously Effective Sedative
Review: I read this book on recommendation of a respected friend, and had a keen interest in exploring the works of the well-regarded Umberto Eco. My surprise and disappointment in muddling through this book only deepened the further I got into the novel. As passionate reader and scholar of literature (and an accused "book snob"), I enjoy challenging books with gorgeous prose, philosophical themes and symbolism. However, I believe that these devices must rely upon, or at least accompany some semblance of a plot. I have to disagree with previous reviewers: "Plot" is not a superflous element of a novel!
If one wishes to purely engorge themselves in symbolism, philosophy, and aesthetic qualities, I would recommend some Yeats poetry, or a trip to an museum of fine art-- rather than spend hours trudging through such a novel as this. Interesting ideas, and beautiful writing, to be sure, but in my opinion not worth the effort. I literally had difficulty remaining conscious while reading this book (and that was before cocktail hour!).
Want a thought-provoking, challenging book that also tells a fine story? Try Brothers Karamozov, Anna Karenina, Lolita, or anything by Faulkner. If you prefer those type of books, The Island of the Day Before will likely be a misuse of your time.

Rating:
Summary: Read a philosophy book
Review: If you are interested in Philosophy, History or Linguistics, buy a textbook, read an original or enroll in a course. If you want to read an engaging novel, stay away from this book. Sure it is well written and scholarly, but the one reason I could see for someone enjoying it is vanity. One must feel scholarly himself reading a thick novel from Eco. The truth is that the scattered gems throughout the book do not provide enough substance to make it stand as a treatise of medieval philosophy, linguistics or history.

I have recently bought Baudolino, and I am still gathering the courage to give Mr. Eco another shot.