The Island Of The Day Before
Ratings14
Average rating3.4
15
Ratings14
Average rating3.4
En el verano de 1643 y en los mares del Sur, un joven piamontés, Roberto de la Grive, arriba como náufrago a una nave desierta. La nave está llena de animales desconocidos y de extrañas máquinas y artilugios, y ante ella, próxima e inalcanzable (no sólo, descubriremos después, en el espacio, sino también en el tiempo) una isla de ensueño. Roberto escribe cartas a la 'Señora'; a través de las cuales se adivina poco a poco su pasado: duelos, asedios, lances amorosos, alambicadas disputas de salón. Se trata, de hecho, de la lenta y traumática iniciación al mundo de la nueva ciencia, las razones de estado, las redes de espionaje de Mazarino y Richelieu, la guerra de los treinta años, en suma, a un cosmos en el que la tierra ha dejado de ser para muchos el centro del universo. En este 'Mar de la Inocencia' nada es inocente, y Roberto lo sabe desde el principio, porque ha llegado a estas Antípodas para resolver -sin personalmente desearlo- el misterio por el cual forcejean las nuevas potencias de la época: el secreto del Punto Fijo.
Reviews with the most likes.
Could not finish. :(
Usually I love Eco, but I didn't like the flow of this book, even though the premise was intriguing.
This book fits the pattern I've come to expect in Umberto Eco's writing: an excellent story lost in a haze of random thoughts, obscure references, and all together too many words. I would love it if someone took this book's concept and turned it into the brilliant book that it deserves to be.
Warning for animal abuse!
Umberto did it again... :-)
I wouldn't mark this as magical realism, because the only magic in it is what is in reality, the beauty of the world and universe and everything.
It is a story of a young man who got shipwrecked to rescue himself on another ship without a crew but filled with natural samples, like plants and birds. Umberto toys with the idea of that on the 180th latitude, an island just 10 meters away, is still in yesterday, while we are already in tomorrow.
It is a fascinating story filled with ideas, but also an adventure story reminding me of Alexandre Dumas' stories, with spies and Richelieu.
probably closer to a 4.5 than a full 5 (i think that the last 100 pages is where the book started to fall off for me) but this entire book was insane. my first eco btw
i did NOT understand all the historical references he was making (my degree was in STEM so frankly i have negative ass understanding), but i appreciated the way eco approaches various philosophies/religions/etc with both a curious and very sardonic eye rather than a pretentious one. and frankly...you don't HAVE to understand every single argument, every single historical event, every single random essay eco inserts into this book (despite there being like so many dense explanations and descriptions of it at a time) because this is a 500 page story about how everything means something–but because everything means something, that also means that everything is meaningless. history, life, death... etc.
like does it matter what happened at casale? in the grand scheme of things–historically speaking, and with regards to the novel–no, not really, because i think eco wanted to emphasize that this was a meaningless war. it meant SOMETHING to the generals that weren't fighting in it. but what about roberto, and his father, and their comrades who died on the field? they don't even know what they were fighting for, at least, roberto certainly didn't.
this argument applies to every major event roberto experiences. with saint-savin, the events post-casale, getting screwed over in france and subsequently shipwrecked, and left to go insane in the middle of the ocean...like i think the senseless misery of his life just breaks him. and roberto wants all this meaningless suffering to mean something! we all would. all throughout the book he is searching for meaning and he receives these answers that don't really satisfy him, though they provide some momentary comforts (usually the religious answers, or the technological inventions he's never seen before, etc).
so over halfway through the book, roberto tries to invent his own meaning–and what does that look like? a dying man's delusion? a story? how's that any different from us when we try to ascribe meaning to the suffering we experience in our individual lives?
favorite parts: when roberto found that room full of clocks (showed this chapter to my brother and when i asked what he thought he said “i think roberto is just cracked out of his fucking mind”), the essay on doves, the dream roberto has of meeting the blind man (this dream is actually my favorite passage in the entire novel), the debate with father caspar closely resembling (ha-ha) the debate saint-savin has with the abbe, saint-savin in general (i wish we got more of him!)...
i'm not gonna lie...this book also super reminded me of the house of leaves. the meta-narrative of it all, the story-in-a-story of it all, the ecstatic nihilism...i think that if eco did that post-modernist shit (i mean this respectful) of like weirdly formatted text, stuck some fake footnotes here and there in his essays, and some sheet music here and there for the daphne, the avg rating of this book would skyrocket
