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by: Umberto Eco
List Price: $15.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780156030373
ISBN: 0156030373
Label: Harvest Books
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 528
Publication Date: June 05, 2006
Publisher: Harvest Books
Sales Rank: 403784
Studio: Harvest Books
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
After a violent storm in the South Pacific in the year 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.
As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he remembers chapters from his youth: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy.
In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The worst novel of one of my favorite authors
I have simply loved every other novel by Umberto Eco I've read. I started with Foucault's Pendulum which I read in college and is still one of my all-time favorite books. Of course, I then went on to read The Name of the Rose which was also great.
More recently I've read Baudolino which I thoroughly enjoyed as well - and which is a much easier read than most of Eco's stuff.
I own The Island of the Day Before in a hard-copy that I bought at Half Price Books, and I'm sorry ... Read More
Rating: - Not a very good read at all
This is a tough book to criticize. I really wanted to like this book. I really wanted to understand the point of the book and the first, second, and third order themes in it. I wanted to put together the puzzle that was in front of me and decipher the hidden symbolism to find the "real" story hidden within. Bah, I couldn't find any of that. It was very difficult to pull the information out of this story and very difficult to get through.
As for getting through it, after a few hundred ... Read More
Rating:  - Eco's Philosophical Bantering
This book is by far the most terrible of all of Eco's productions yet. The book is flooded, no grotesquely bursting with tangents and the usual philosophical rubbish. The reminisces of Roberto's childhood are entertaining and even the time on the ship, but few, if any readers I venture, will have patience for his constant philosophical bickering over first the Meridian and then irrelevantly the meridian line. Roberto's twin Ferrante as an alternate fantasy might be amusing except that it overall detracts ... Read More
Rating:  - A sea of irony holds no prisoners...
Marooned on a supposedly deserted ship within sight of an island photophobic nobleman Roberto della Griva must surive, and for a man to survive he must tell stories. So he writes a series of letters to his love from which this story is constructed by a 20th-century scholar some time later. Interesting as this sounds it soon gets bogged down in an ever-present sense of irony.
Don't get me wrong: I love irony as a story-telling device and use it myself in my poor attempts at fiction, but I think Eco ... Read More
Rating: - Bloated
I wanted to like this book, but ultimately it is just too long, too confusing, and too self-indulgent to like. It revolves around a marooned man (marooned on a ship--while looking at an unreachable island) who confuses his own imaginings with reality--and confuses us a bit along with him. It seems to me that Eco took every little sophist philosophical musing he ever had and tucked it somewhere in this book. Clever wordplay, clever ideas--marooned on a ship, e.g. Christ trapped on the Island and waiting to be freed, ... Read More
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