Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before has a fascinating premise, but it takes entirely too long to execute it, if it can be said that it comes to any conclusion at all. I was listening to this book on tape, and not even the sonorous tones of Tim Curry could rescue this tome from oblivion.
There are several fascinating elements to this story, not the least of which is the international race to find the "secrets of longitude." The trouble is, I kept waiting for some kind of payoff, some clue regarding the actual historical discovery. But that never happened because the whole of the story is set on a ship forever trapped off the shore of an imaginary island. Most of the plot is presented in flashbacks or through the intervention of an semi-omnipotent narrator, an unnamed scholar who has stumbled upon the protagonist Roberto's papers. Roberto is an unreliable narrator because he is gradually going mad, and is of questionable sanity to begin with. The scholar, although presenting himself as an authority, invites the reader's disbelief in what is sheer speculation on his part. The layers of narration, the impossibility of the island, and the hallucinatory blurring of the line between reality and dream, sanity and madness, leaves the entire novel feeling more like a creative writing exercise than anything else.
However, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, "If you can't understand it and nothing ever happens, it's probably Literature."
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