The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco
published 1995 - read 2005

As good as Foucault's Pendulum? No... really not anywhere close, although for a while it seems like it could be. The initial premise is killer: some dude in the 1600s gets shipwrecked in the South Pacific and washes ashore on...another ship. Abandoned by the crew, but in seemingly pristine condition, filled with mysterious scientific equipment, anchored in the bay of an island that the castaway can't reach, because he can't swim. Now that's a great setup.

Eco keeps us reading based on the mystery of that situation while taking a couple hundred pages to set up the character and get us into his world. These sections manage to not drag, thanks to a healthily wry distance the author takes from the material (purportedly assembled from manuscripts left behind by the castaway). Unfortunately, things start to go downhill once the mystery of the ship is resolved and we're all caught up on the castaway's history, because his present really isn't all that compelling. This isn't helped by the incredibly involved metaphorical digressions that our highly educated Late Renaissance man embarks upon, or his irksome inability to understand that the International Date Line doesn't actually mean you can travel back in time. This is also about the point in the book when the author's wry distance fades, meaning that he no longer glosses past all the painfully involved tangents. I have to give Eco credit for producing such a compelling facsimile of the thought process of this character and his zeitgeist, but so much of it never goes anywhere, and the narrator himself confesses that the ending is unsatisfying and lacking in drama.  Is that part of the point?  Maybe, but I'm too dumb to get it and this was a long book!  In Foucault's Pendulum, Eco managed to link his ideas up to a story that, for all its digressions, definitely kept going somewhere, and never let go of the suspense coiled up in its first chapters. The Island of the Day Before misses the boat on both counts, so for all its moments of genuine interest and its convincing portrayal of seventeenth-century thought processes, it's hard to recommend.

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