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Author: ECO, Umberto
Translator: Weaver, William
Title: Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before.
Publisher: NewYork, San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995. First U.S. Edition
Notes: The Island of the Day Before is an ingenious tale that begins with a shipwreck in 1643. Roberta della Griva survives and boards another ship only to find himself trapped. Flashbacks give us Renaissance battles, the French court, spies, intriguing love affairs, and the attempt to solve the problem of longitude. It's a world of metaphors and paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar
After his tremendous success with "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault’s Pendulum", Eco claimed that he had no plans for another novel. However a few years later, "The Island of the Day Before" would be developed from Eco’s ideas about "writing about pure nature" within "a story of concepts".
Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932 in a small town of Alessandria, in the northwestern province of Piedmont, east of Turin and south of Milan. A mountainous area, the Piedmontese are used to a certain sense of independence, and in many ways they are marked by the phlegmatic nature of the nearby French rather than the fiery passions of the southern Italians. Eco often cites his upbringing among this culture as a source of the unique temperament in his writing: "Certain elements remain as the basis for my world vision: a skepticism and an aversion to rhetoric. Never to exaggerate, never to make bombastic assertions."
Urged by his father to become a lawyer, he entered the University of Turin. But, against his father’s wishes, he abandoned his studies of law and took up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his doctorate of philosophy in 1954. After this, he entered the world of journalism by taking a position in Milan as Editor for Cultural Programs at Italy’s state-owned television network, RAI, giving him a first-hand opportunity to examine modern culture through the eyes of the media.
In 1956, he published his first book, which was an extension of his thesis: Il problema estetico in San Tommaso. That same year he began lecturing at his alma mater, and over this time he began building up a network of avant-garde writers, musicians, and painters, many of which are still associated with him today. In 1959 he published his second work, "Sviluppo dell’estetico medievale", establishing Eco as one of the foremost thinkers in medievalism, and finally convincing his father that he had indeed made the right career decision.
in 1959 he became the nonfiction senior editor of Casa Editrice Bompiani, Milan, while also producing a monthly column called Diario minimo, for Il Verri. During these years Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the open text and on semiotics, penning many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta, or The Open Work. Although his position as a renown columnist seemed assured, the next few years would see many transitions in his life. By the late seventies, Eco had established a very sound reputation as a semiotician; but no one was expecting the radical direction his career would take as novelist by the end of the decade.
A NEAR FINE COPY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN EDITION!
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Condition: 8vo. 515 pages. First American Edition. Blue cloth over blue boards, title in gilt to spine. Near Fine with Near Fine Dustjacket protected in mylar.
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