Book Review: The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco, famous for his medieval mystery The Name of the Rose and slightly less well known for occult classic Foucault’s Pendulum, managed to sneak in a different, remarkable book on my shelves.

The Island of the Day Before is Eco’s thorough exploration of an age of exploration and of the baroque. He navigates among a Europe on the verge of enlightenment, and the book spins lengthy ramblings on geography, religion, and science as the characters try, and often falter, to make sense of their world.

Young Italian aristocrat Roberto is a baroque paragon who absorbs shifting and contradictory worldviews as easily as he meets unusual characters on his travels. Roberto finds himself shipwrecked upon a ship, a turn within a turn. The ship is beeched on a coral reef within a bay or atoll. From its deck, he can see islands on either side of the ship, and later guesses they are the same island. There, he spends his days reminiscing about the travels that brought him to this end, and having a few odd adventures with a bizarre mystery shipmate.

Roberto’s flashbacks, told by the narrator who refers to Roberto’s journaling on the ship, comprise the meat of the novel, and certainly the most entertaining, even absurdly humorous episodes. Eco portrays Roberto as a noble’s son who, upon facing discipline from his hard farther, concocts tales of an evil twin, Ferrante, his ultimate foil, an evil mirror image whom Roberto repeatedly and imaginatively plots into wild romances to explain his own miseries and misfortunes.

Roberto battles the Spanish (where he watches his father die futilely, if somewhat valiantly), lounges with occult philosophers in Paris, learns sword dueling from an old atheist skeptic, and dabbles in espionage at the behest of the French cardinal. And, in each such episode, he encounters worldview after worldview, readily lapping up each one right after the contradictory other.

Roberto does show flourish – he absorbs those disparate philosophies and weaves in his own variations and swirls, a creative act that lands him at the mercy of the cardinal and puts him aboard a doomed ship destined for the titular island. Their mission? Discover what the British are up to in using a strange sympathetic magic to master measuring longitude at sea.

That mystery – the measurement of longitude – becomes Roberto’s obsession so he can return to his unrequited Parisian love. Once he discovers a mad old Jesuit who hides from him on the wrecked ship, the two set out with contraption after contraption to reach the shores of the island where the Jesuit has erected a device he claims proves the spot the antimeridian. Oddly enough, neither of them can swim.

Father Caspar is a mad genius, and wildly colorful character, who confounds Roberto into believing that God borrowed water from “the day before” by carrying it from beyond the antimeridian to carry out Noah’s flood. Here again, Roberto laps up apocalyptic notions from Caspar, and again rolls those into his amalgamated worldview even after Caspar perishes in a bit of black humor while trying to invent a diving bell contraption.

For all the color and absurdity (from a modern reader’s perspective, especially) of the cast of characters, Roberto is Eco’s accomplishment. Eco writes a novel in celebration of the baroque era, transforming his written narrative in substance and style as a baroque homage. It’s no small effort; today the word baroque is derogatory. But, importantly, Roberto is not merely the modern readers “eyes” to experience it all. In the end, he’s Eco’s triumph to reveal his genuine love for the art, and the soul of Roberto.

Despite challenging chapters, and ever expanding meanderings of philosophical fancy and minutiae, the book delivers in the end. It’s a flawed, but absolutely fascinating book.

The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco: B+

The post Book Review: The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco appeared first on Mathew Snyder's Blog.