The Island of The Day Before - Umberto Eco

The reason for my choice was that this novel was bought for me by my workmates when I left WA to move to Queensland. I tried to read it a couple of times and couldn’t get past the first page, so it has sat on my bookshelf for nearly ten years. By choosing it I’ve had to read it, and am pleased that I have finally done so.


I did have some problems with it! Firstly, the book is almost completely narrated with even the narrator stating he may not have the story correct, because who he is to know…..? Chapter 34 begins with the narrator reminding us that Roberto has borrowed from the novelists of his century the habit of narrating so many stories at once that at a certain point it becomes difficult to pick up the thread. I agree……. Also the lack of a definitive ending after the hard work of ploughing through all that philosophizing, discussion and lecturing was a bit of a let down.

Nobleman Roberto della Griva due to a series of circumstances is sent to sea on a ship to discover the Punto Fijo – which is the means of unraveling the mystery of longitude. He is ultimately shipwrecked and whilst adrift he comes upon the supposedly deserted ship Daphne anchored just off the reef of an Island. The idea of the Island being on the antipodal meridian and therefore across the dateline was an interesting premise for the story, and brought some humour when Roberto was looking for Father Caspar who had left the ship in his diving contraption to retrieve the Specula Melitensis. Roberto believes the reason he cannot see Father Caspar arriving on the beach is because he is looking at yesterday.

The novel is basically a series of stories. Some of them were immensely boring – the siege of Casale, his time in Paris, the problem of longitude (though historically proven) etc. Some stories were intriguing – The Powder of Sympathy, the wounded dog, the idea of his mysterious twin Ferrante (who I think could have been utilised to a better extent instead of creating the novel within a novel to follow his adventures). Some stories were very humerous, I enjoyed reading about Father Caspar teaching Roberto to swim, and also their experiments together. However, Father Caspar as a character was extremely annoying and I could not help but think of Yoda from Star Wars, as their sentence structure was so similar! It was interesting to read the theories on astronomy, eclipses, religion etc from the 17th century (innocent) point of view and meticulously researched by Eco, but sometimes I felt that I was reading the rantings of a madman, he seemed to go on and on about nothing at all. Roberto wondering if stones could think, and pretending to be a stone…. I mean what was that about? Sometimes Roberto thought far too much, and unfortunately at times this was inflicted on the reader.

However with that aside, and with the irritation of too much narration (for me, I prefer dialogue between characters to tell me the story), the novel was beautifully written, and I can imagine it would be more so in it’s original Italian, and probably much would have been lost in the translation. You were in the seventeenth century, it had that ‘feel’ about it, and I miss that now that I have finished it.