Continuing my sporadic (re)reading of Eco's work, comes this big novel from 2006, which is, like Queen Loana (above), one of those Eco novels in which the protagonist, facing some kind of crisis, re-examines his (and it is always his) life, loves and the nature of existence. The other type of Eco novel is the historical-conspiratorial shaggy dog story as in Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino or The Prague Cemetary. I have decided that I vastly prefer the latter. The Island of the Day Before starts in the mid-seventeenth century, with a still relatively young Italian, Roberto, marooned on an apparently empty ship, the Daphne, moored off a mysterious South Pacific island, that may be in the Solomon Islands or maybe not - either way Roberto cannot reach it because he cannot swim. His story is told by an anonymous and somewhat sceptical narrator who has supposedly acquired the papers upon which he set down both his real life story and his romantic fictions and philosophical speculations, despite being, as the narrator keeps reminding us, no real philosopher (and only weakly acquainted with writing fiction).

The story is anchored by two things: firstly, Roberto's failure in love and his continued desire for a perfect blonde woman he only vaguely knew (another tiresome late period Eco trope) while living in Paris amongst the natural philosophers and libertines, and who he comes to associate with a rare orange dove suposedly found on the nearby island; and secondly, the search for a reliable way of ascertaining longitude, a quest which obessed the amateur scientists and engineers of the period. The title comes from the notion that the international date line, upon or near which the Daphne sits, is the point at which yesterday becomes today or today becomes tomorrow, or both, a notion which starts to play an increasingly large role in Roberto's fevered imagination of his beloved and how he might be (re)united with her.

It would all be so good, were it not for the fact that the whole book is pretty much entirely diversion, and extended and not very profound reflections on everything from biology to space-time and god. And these reflections can't be that profound because Roberto, the protagonist, isn't that profound, and so we have pages and pages of mediocre speculation in verbose early modern fashion that read like the seventeenth century equivalent of a stoned undergraduate. 

Not his best.