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A review by aoyenhi
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
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i did NOT understand all the historical references he was making (my degree was in STEM so frankly i have negative ass understanding), but i appreciated the way eco approaches various philosophies/religions/etc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 respectfully) 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
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 respectfully) 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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Torture and Schizophrenia/Psychosis
Minor: Animal cruelty, Sexual content, Violence, Xenophobia, Vomit, Religious bigotry, Death of parent, Colonisation, and War
while this all sounds pretty brutal (and it kind of is), most if not all of these things are described with such an impersonal language and usually some sort of parenthetical / argumentative response that condemns the more egregious of these ideas (esp religious bigotry) that it wasn't triggering for me at all.
but the premise of the novel is genuinely just torture. do not recommend if your biggest fear is a slow death in the middle of an ocean because eco goes into gruesome detail about how much derealization roberto is put through as a result.