...All My Troubles Seemed so Far Away (The Island of the Day Before - Umberto Eco)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	The Island of the Day Before - Umberto Eco
Date:	24/10/01 (173 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting asides into history, politics and literary theory, you can learn a lot from the book

Disadvantages: Plot weak in places, disappointing ending

The international dateline. The place where the world entered the new millennium while most of us Brits were fast asleep in bed. The place where you can walk from today to yesterday and back again in just two steps. The place where, if this tale is to be believed, a young Italian nobleman was once shipwrecked and set about documenting the events that had brought him to this fate.

“The Island of the Day Before” is the third novel by Umberto Eco, the philosopher, historian and literary critic best known for his first novel “The Name of the Rose” (which was made into a successful film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater). As a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Eco is well respected in academic circles and his books (both fiction and non-fiction) are certainly challenging for the reader. Before reading this novel, I had previously read a non-fiction study of language and semiotics by the author entitled “Kant and the Platypus”, which I have to admit that I found hard to follow, despite having a degree in languages, and have never actually got around to finishing. Although friends to have read novels by Eco warned me that these were also “difficult”, this book caught my eye in the bookshop and I needed something to read on my holiday, so thought I would give it a go.

And my reaction now that I have finished it? Well, I am certainly glad that I read it. “The Island of the Day Before” is not so much a novel in the traditional sense as a textbook on history, philosophy and literary techniques that has left my mind reeling. The main story of the novel is quite a simple one – an Italian nobleman, Roberto della Griva, who has been acting as a French spy is shipwrecked in the Pacific ocean in the year 1643. Unable to swim, he saves his life by clinging to a plank and wakes the next day to find he is floating beneath a Dutch vessel moored close to a collection of islands
. He pulls himself aboard to find the vessel recently deserted (the Marie Celeste of its time) and begins to document both his life up to that point and his life on the ship.

One of Eco’s greatest achievements is that although the book is over 500 pages long, Roberto never leaves the ship, except for a few futile attempts at learning to swim. Despite this, there is a continuous stream of new ideas for Roberto to explore and adventures for him to have. Through flashbacks we learn of Roberto’s early life in which he found himself trapped in a castle under siege (much as he is now trapped in the ship) and his love for a French Lady, while in the present Roberto explores the philosophical problems of his day. Through a series of events he comes to believe that the islands he can see from the ship are the islands on the antipodal meridian. He learns that the on the islands it is always “yesterday” due to the international dateline and fools himself into believing that if he were to reach the islands he could literally travel back in time to his own yesterday – a belief that becomes increasingly important to him as the story progresses.

The second great achievement Eco makes in this novel is in the way he handles the factual elements of history and philosophy. In the modern age of hand-held global positioning devices it is hard for us to comprehend a time when it was impossible for sailors to work out their exact position on the ocean. Centuries of stargazing had taught them how to calculate latitude, so they were able to tell how far north of south they were, but in the seventeenth century there was still no way of determining how far east or west you were of where you started out. In other words, the sailors were unable to determine longitude. The great sailing nations (Spain, Britain, Portugal, Holland) were in a desperate race to discover the secret of longitude, for whoever made this discovery would be the undisputed m
aster of the seas. The significance of this discovery was made clear to me when I read that although New Zealand and Tasmania had been discovered at this time, it would be another 150 years until someone found the massive expanse of land that is Australia – all because vessels were unable to determine their longitude and simply sailed past Australia in ignorance.

Eco tells the reader all this information and much, much more, then moves on to the other great problems of the day, which were mostly religious. Again, this is something that the modern reader may initially struggle to see the significance of, but at the time there were furious debates about whether the Sun circled the Earth, or vice versa. Galileo had just spent the larger part of his life under house arrest by the Catholic church for daring to suggest that the Earth circled the sun and the philosophical community was split into those devout churchgoers who saw the Earth as the centre of the universe and the “heretics” who dared to suggest they were wrong. Eco spells out the arguments of both sides and, without the benefit of modern scientific equipment as they were, it is sometimes easy to see why the matter caused so much debate. When a priest whom Roberto encounters claims that the Earth is the centre of the universe he backs this up with the Argument of the Wheel, the Argument of the Archer, the Argument of the Birds and numerous others that the church had devised. Take the Argument of the Archer, for example – if the Earth really were circling the Sun and revolving, then an arrow fired straight up would land many miles to the west of the archer. It is much more logical (in the eyes of the church) that the Earth is stationary and everything else revolves around it. Each argument on its own can be refuted, but together they grow stronger and leave even the modern day reader with an element of doubt in his mind.

Eco also subverts his own novel by playing with t
he traditions of literature. Unusually for a novel written nowadays, the book is written from an omnipotent viewpoint and the narrator sometimes drifts away from the action he is describing to mull over a new thought or pass comment on what is happening. Indeed, the narrator claims that what we are reading is simply his recreation of events based on a stack of letters and memoirs written by Roberto while shipwrecked that have been handed down to him. The narrator doubts what Roberto is saying in places, corrects his errors in others and provides explanations for Roberto’s actions even through he fears these explanations may not quite be accurate.

Perhaps the most literary quality of this book is when Roberto decides to write a novel of his own to pass the time while shipwrecked. The narrator constantly picks holes in what Roberto is writing and explains in detail the literary techniques the fictional character is using. Great passages of this “book within a book” are presented to the reader and as Roberto succumbs to the solitude and isolation on board the ship he finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the fiction he is writing and the reality of his situation.

I do, however, have a few minor complaints about the book as well. Eco is obviously a polyglot and well-versed in the classics – which means that phrases of Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Dutch appear in the book. As a translator myself I was able to understand most (but not all) of these references and I imagine that most British people would find these sections hard going. The novel was originally written in Italian and I feel that the translator of the English text should perhaps have made concessions for the English speaking audience (or at least included a glossary of foreign terms). I am not arguing that the whole novel should have been written exclusively in English (which would have killed many of the references made), but perhaps
explanatory text could have been added or paraphrase used to aid the reader.

My second complaint is that the story itself is not very interesting. For me, much of the interest came from the constant asides into history, philosophy, literary techniques and even the “bad” novel written by Roberto. The actual storyline of “The Island of the Day Before” is simple and the ending seems as if it were almost added as an afterthought. Eco spends so much time in his philosophical discussions that at the end he has backed himself into a corner plot-wise and there is only one (rather unsatisfactory) way out remaining to him.

Nevertheless, this is a very interesting book that has whet my appetite and made me want to learn more about this period of history. I remember hearing of a book simply called “Longitude” recently that tells the true story of the race to discover this secret and since reading “The Island of the Day Before” I have been keeping an eye out for it. Perhaps that is what Eco is really wanting in this novel, to stimulate our imaginations and make us go out and investigate the areas that interest him. This is an author whose books I will definitely be making an effort to read more of.

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