The fortnightly book this time around will be Umberto Eco's third novel, The Island of the Day Before. It's unlikely to top The Name of the Rose or Foucault's Pendulum, the only fiction works by Eco that I've read (I've read a large portion of his nonfiction), and a look at critical reviews shows that most people think it hasn't come close, but as it's Eco one can be sure that there will be plenty in the book to like, whatever its shortcomings.
In the 1640s, Roberto della Griva finds himself shipwrecked and cast up, not on a deserted island but on a deserted ship. He's stuck there because although he can see land, he cannot swim. It is thus a Robinsonade with a twist. (Telegraphed by the name of the main character, who is doubly Robin-ish: Robin is a diminutive for Robert and 'Griva' is Catalan for a thrush, of which a robin is one kind; and the robin references are increased by other names, like Wanderdrossel, also a name for a thrush.) It, of course, would not be an Eco novel without also being a treatise on epistemology, and one can see just by glancing through that we have Eco's full toolbox of semiotic quirks and curiosities -- doppelgangers and lists and anachronistic allusions and endlessly many other things.
