Synopses & Reviews
After a violent storm in the South Pacific (the year is 1643), Roberto della Griva finds himself shipwrecked on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of an international race to establish the Punto Fijo of a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and of a most amazing old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood.
Review
"Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges....The Island of the Day Before is an ingenious tale...a world of metaphors and paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar." James Dudley, Library Journal
Review
"After the somewhat heavy-handed Foucault's Pendulum (1989), Eco has returned to the sort of erudite humor, suspense, stimulating philosophy, and cunning wordplay that made The Name of the Rose (1983) so popular. And, once again, translator William Weaver has done a superb job." Donna Seaman, Booklist
Review
"Like Joyce, Eco does not hesitate to push the novel to new limits." Patrick H. Samway
Review
"A gripping concoction of mystery, political intrigue, and adventure with generous doses of romance and comic relief...Mr. Eco is a master storyteller." The Baltimore Sun
Review
"As wonderfully exotic as only Eco can contrive, with his encyclopedic knowledge and his captivating stoytelling skills....An astonishing intellectual journey" The San Franciso Chronicle
Review
"A masterpiece...intellectually stimulating and dramatically intriguing." The Chicago Tribune
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"This is high art that has not forgotten its origins in the tale told around a campfire....Eco gives us, as we rarely get it, the novel as comedy, as adventure tale, as romance, above all as wellspring of ideas." Newsday
Review
"Every age gets the classics it deserves. I hope we deserve The Island of the Day Before. If we do, we will not only know the pleasure of a profound and ingenious story artfully told but will experience Renaissance battles, love poems, and sea journeys in the age of exploration. Shipwrecked among archaic scientific nightmares and failed beginnings and dead ends of technology, we will recover the perennial hope of making sense of what happens to us....This novel belongs in the great tradition of the conte philosophique, like Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Johnson's Rasselas, and Voltaire's Candide." The New York Times Book Review