Roberto had sailed on an English ship the Amaryllis. Of course she never receives these letters, but somehow Roberto’s opus survives and ends up in the hands of our narrator some 450 years later. He worships her, had tried to woo her, but she doesn’t take him seriously in the slightest. It’s a brilliant tour de force.Īs the novel opens Roberto is writing to the woman he loves, Lady Lilia in Paris. This is a 512 page novel and one gets the impression that Roberto’s writings might comprise 30-50 pages, even less, the rest the narrator fills in with surmise, logic, his profound understanding of the time and his direct conversations with us the readers.
The island of the day before full#
Roberto’s letters to his lady love, Lilia and other notes and entries are sketchy and few, but the narrator struggles to flesh them out into a the full history of Roberto. A narrator, at times an undisguised Umberto Eco, has come into possession of a manuscript written in the 1640s by Roberto della Griva. The basic structure of the novel is complex and delightful. Then along the way I’ll mention some thoughts I have on lesser plots and other aspects of the novel. I’ll begin with the main story line giving as little of the plot development as possible so as not spoil anyone’s reading, still hopefully giving enough of it to tweak interest and describe what the book is about on one level. Yet a full treatment of each line of the novel would be too extensive. I don’t want to do a version of this over-simplification by just following the (seemingly) main story line as the film makers did with that work. Hollywood film makers took THE NAME OF THE ROSE, stripped it down to the semi-horror murder mystery and lost virtually everything of significance in that novel, even if they did create a marvelous role for Sean Connery. To say the least Umberto Eco’s THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE is rich, demanding, stimulating, scandalously and deliciously indulgent, and extremely well-crafted and written. Each of the shorter treatments is beautifully constructed and intellectually challenging, as well as revelatory of mid-17th century thought and manner each a vehicle of Eco’s stunning writing, insights and scholarship. The novel is a cornucopia of dazzling writing and thinking. An amazing fantasy of a crazy world within the novel itself?.The stupefying word games, puns, arcane linguistic usage and details?.The conflicts of metaphysical views in this period?.
The search for a manner of measuring and identifying longitudes?.Roberto della Griva’s life story, which is the longest plot-line seemingly the central thrust of the story?.Thus were I to follow my usual pattern which plot do I present? Which is really central? In each there are multiple plots, each somewhat related but separable.
I’ve read all three of his novels (THE NAME OF THE ROSE and FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM are the earlier two).
With Umberto Eco this will not be sufficient. I normally begin my comments on a novel with a few relatively non-revelatory notes about the plot. Translated from the Italian L’ISOLA DEL GIORNA PRIMA