I'm now reading The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. Eco's famous for his intricate novels, with layer upon layer of reference and meaning. He's a semiotician, an academic concerned with signs and the meanings of messages, symbols, metaphors and the like. That's another way of saying he's one hell of a lot smarter than me.
It makes his books challenging reads. I've read Foucault's Pendulum, but not his most famous work, The Name of the Rose. Eco's approach is often to zero into a European period and locale, detail it obsessively, and invest into his work clever meanings and explorations of meaning. The Island of the Day Before is an exploration of the early 17th century and the baroque. Which means the prose itself is deliberately baroque and not for casual, sleepy eyed reading.
I read a handful of brief reviews, and many were disgusted with this book. Perhaps I shouldn't have let it color my reading, but I'm delighted so far. It's clever, complicated and funny, and I'm eager to see if he can maintain interest given the protagonist is stuck on an abandoned sailing ship and unlikely to leave it (he can't swim). Fortunately, the flashbacks remain engaging, and the ship a mystery.
Where's the new fiction you've written? Stay in it!
ReplyDeleteI have a million excuses for not doing it, but today one great reason to keep doing it. Thanks for the comment!
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