The Island of the Day Before

Umberto Eco

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780156030373
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547563893
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

A 17th century Italian nobleman is marooned on an empty ship in this "astonishing intellectual journey" by the author of  Foucault's Pendulum ( San Francisco Chronicle).
 
In the year 1643, a violent storm in the South Pacific leaves Roberto della Griva 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 looks back on various episodes from his life: 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 "intellectually stimulating and dramatically intriguing" novel, Umberto Eco conjures a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and an old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood ( Chicago Tribune).

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Epigraphs
• Daphne
• An Account of Events in the Monferrato
• The Serraglio of Wonders
• Fortification Display’d
• The Labyrinth of the World
• The Great Art of Light and Shadow
• Pavane Lachryme
• The Curious Learning of the Wits of the Day
• The Aristotelian Telescope
• Geography and Hydrography Reformed
• The Art of Prudence
• The Passions of the Soul
• The Map of Tendernes
• A Treatise on the Science of Arms
• Horologium Oscillatorium
• Discourse on the Powder of Sympathy
• Longitudinum Optata Scientia
• Unheard-of Curiosities
• A New Voyage Round the World
• Wit and the Art of Ingenuity
• Telluris Theoria Sacra
• The Orange Dove
• Divers and Artificious Machines
• Dialogues of the Maximum Systems
• Technica Curiosa
• Delights for the Ingenious: A Collection of Emblems
• The Secrets of the Flux and Reflux of the Sea
• Of the Origin of Novels
• The Soul of Ferrante
• Anatomy of Erotic Melancholy
• A Breviary for Politicals
• A Garden of Delights
• Mundus Subterraneus
• Monologue on the Plurality of Worlds
• Joyfull Newes out of the Newfound Worlde
• The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying
• Paradoxical Exercises Regarding the Thinking of Stones
• An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell
• Itinerarium Extaticum Coeleste
• Colophon
• Translator’s Postscript
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes