The Island of the Day Before

I have just finished reading The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco, and although I should be able to write some sort of a review, I feel that it would be better to wait until it sinks in a bit. Some books are like that - you don't know what you really think of them untill some time affter you have finished them, and after they have swirled around in your sub-conscious for a while.

Suffice it to say that the reviews the book gets on Amazon are far from complimentary: 'Eco becomes Narcissus' says one, and 21 out of 24 readers agreed; 'Eco needs a stricter editor' says another, and all four readers who responded agreed with that; 'Self-indulgent intellectualism' said a third, to which remark 11 out of 15 people agreed. Basically the readers found that the book failed to provide enough of a story, and wallowed in self-indulgent intellectualism. Hmm ... maybe they are right, but I'll let it settle in my head first. The comments on the US amazon site were slightly less critical, but still not good: 'Less Than I Expected', 'Weakest of Eco's fiction -- not that that's a bad thing', and so on.

The book is the tale of an Italian nobleman shipwrecked in the South Pacific in 1643. As part of a cabal instigated by French Cardinal Mazarin and his protege Colbert, Robert della Griva has been traveling in disguise on an English ship whose mission is to discover the Punto Fijo, the means by which navigators can plumb "the mystery of longitude." The rest I won't give away, in case the bad reviews don't put you off!