Krishna
In the early days of this blog, we have reviewed The Name Of The Rose by the same author. This book feels and reads very different. Let us jump right into the story.
Roberto della Griva was thrown from the deck of the ship Amaryllis and survived by sticking to a plank in the rough seas. He dozed off, near death, and came to near the ship Daphne. He managed to climb aboard with what remained of his strength and revived himself by drinking water that was on Daphne’s deck.
We learn that he survived his shipwreck by lying on a plank, with no control over the raging sea but to go where it took him. He also is surprised to find that the new ship, Daphne is abandoned with no explanation of why or where the crew went.
As for backstory, we learn that Roberto was a boy with mischievous behaviour, even spiteful, and attributed all his bad deeds to his nonexistent twin Ferrante who did all the deeds and disappeared so that the blame would fall on Roberto.
Then the story shifts to Duke of Mantus, Vincenzo II was dying heirless and there was a succession battle raging. They try to convince Vincento to give it to Charles de Gonzaga the duke of Nevers. He is married to a niece of Vincenzo to get this ‘official’. Nevers is French now owning an Italian province. Infuriated, the Spanish duke besieged the town of Casale, hoping to get Mantus assigned to the Spanish.
After a confusing melee the French capture many towns. The story wanders a lot, with him meeting a priest who does not believe in God and another priest who has created a ridiculous looking ‘machine’ which is really a catalog of everything on earth – controlled by dials with letters on them. Sounds ridiculous.
He ruminates in the ship some more and the story shifts back and forth between the past – the siege of Calais – and the present which is his life in an abandoned ship.
He is in love with a lady whom he has only seen through a window. (Once when an older person was removing lice from her blond hair). He is deeply in love and his priestly friend dictates a love letter with such ardor that he trembles and asks him to give it to the lady. When Roberto really meets her next, he is overcome with shyness and misses the opportunity.
The story keeps alternating between the Calais politics and the ship life. The former with French siege, Spanish resistance and finally peace and liberation with practically no major events happening and the latter with his thoughts and spying of the island that seems unreachable, again with nothing happening.
You start getting bored with nonevents, even though some of the descriptions are interesting. You cannot have nice language about nothing, which is what the book seems to be all about.
He talks of Paris where Roberto had yet another infatuation with yet another girl and waxed eloquent (and somewhat stupid) about love in a party.
He is then (possibly) mistaken for another, arrested and Cardinal Richelieu’s successor sends him on an espionage mission to learn the secrets of how longitude is calculated – they have a way of calculating this that no one else has and it is Roberto’s mission to get as much information as possible. He goes as a prisoner, watched by his companions on the same ship.
Why was he suspected? What was he suspected of to be blackmailed? It is all confusing and left unsaid.
Umberto seems to take us into too many diversionary paths. A story that is already confusing enough with the twin stories of his exploration in a ship where he knows there is at least one more unseen stowaway and his past adventures is confusing enough without all these diversions that come and go; for instance the priest who likes to say shocking, almost blasphemous things is suddenly killed in the siege and is spoken of no more. What was he doing in the story in the first place?
It turns out that the secret of longitude is an absurd theory that a dog that is being deliberately kept wounded in the doctor’s quarters will ‘feel’ the sword being put in fire in England – as the dog’s blood has been previously rubbed on it before it left England and thus they can synchronize the time between England and wherever they were and therefore figure out the longitude of the place. Go figure.
The story catches up with the present time now because right after that, the ship got wrecked and Roberto escaped from the wreck of Amaryllis and reached Daphne.
The secret intruder in Roberto’s ship turns out to be a priest who had originally come from the ship in search of a similar goal. However, the crew shunned the priest because they thought he had the plague. They evacuated with tools and wood and supplies to the island, not realizing that there were savages who came in the night, slaughtered the group to a man and ate them. When they tried to come to investigate the ship, one cannon shot from the priest convinced them that this is a powerful monster. They ran back to the island and disappeared, after offering the monster (from afar, on the island) flowers and bowing to it to show that they seek peace.
There is another absurd theory of trying to mix science with theology when the priest explains where the water that drowned the entire world during Noah’s flood (which submerged the tallest mountain for one hundred and forty days) came from. Scientifically absurd but interesting thought process. One gets the impression that Umberto is mocking religiosity, having met the Catholic priest earlier who blasphemes and this priest trying hard to explain where so much water to drown the world came from and where it disappeared to one hundred and forty days later, leaving the world as we find it today.
The story is full of weird theories and contraptions that make no sense. Anyway, the priest and Roberto engage in constructing a pan with oil in which the priest sits on a chair to look at the stars ‘as the oil keeps the level always stable’ so that they can determine latitude calculations. Despite the hilarious failure of the experiment, this thing sounds wrongheaded or maybe it is I who cannot appreciate the intricacies of this storytelling.
There is a whole lot of blather about why earth is the geocentric locus of the universe and why Galileo and others were wrong – as a conversation between Roberto and the priest and more blather about universe being a pentagon on whose each side crazy things like pyramids are assembled. I don’t see the point of any of these to the story or even the advancement of ideas so was fairly switched off during the pages and pages of conversation with apparently no point.
There are comedic moments where Roberto waits for the priest who went underwater to emerge on the island. Since the island is on the other side of the International Date Line – and hence the book’s title of The Island Of The Day Before – he knows that it is ‘yesterday’ there and when the priest does not come out at all, he assumes that he needs to wait a day because it will be today on that island that is visible from here only tomorrow.
If it is intended as a humorous book, which I suspect it partly is, the humour does not stand out and so you are confused as to what the point of all the conversations are.
Now, after the priest’s ‘exit’ he is obsessed with going to the island to site the rate ‘orange dove’ that the man spoke of.
There is a whole pile on dove, from various ancient writings from various places. All in support of Roberto now wanting to see the exotic Orange Dove. Weird things happen. First Roberto is determined to learn swimming by himself and reach the island. When that fails, he wants to write a story about his rival in love Ferrante, imagining his life in Spain while he is here, stranded aboard the Daphne.
Ferrante poses as Roberto and wins the heart and the body of the Lady, tormenting Roberto (who is writing the story!). He goes too far and is thrown into prison being mistaken for Roberto. (They look alike as Ferranto is Roberto’s brother).
He makes up a story where Roberto imagines that Ferranto is rescued by the lady and they fo off in a boat to a chain of islands – each more weird than the others in terms of inhabitants – a crazy imagination from the author – and make incessant love in all of them.
Purpose, you ask? Who knows? Perhaps only the author.
Sometimes his chatter is absolutely meaningless. Roberto imagines all materials – for instance a gold piece that can be drawn like a thread. Perhaps insects can draw it further into thinner and thinner threads; the insects on those insects can draw these into even more refined threads, at the subatomic level, ultimately into nothingness and a void. Does any of these make sense to any of you even in a story?
Or, this gem : I think but my body is made of parts, hands, legs etc and blood. Does the blood think of itself as “I”? All beings think to varied levels, animals less and plants even less. Even stones may think. Perhaps all they can think is “I stone, I stone, I stone”. Or maybe they cannot think of themselves as I so they think “stone stone stone”.
Yeah, right! What kind of drivel is this? It goes on and on, with Roberto trying ‘to be a stone’ and rolling down the slopes. He then in his story, kills Ferrante and sends him to an afterlife of rotting flesh and exposed innards – a life of eternity in an island with other dead people.
The book then ends in a bizarre note with the fiction that Roberto created and the real fact of his existence aboard the stranded Dahphe merging (in his mind) to one fluid story. The ending is hinted at but left to the imagination of the reader.
I would have normally said that this is all nonsense with no purpose, but the prose, the thinking, the explanations grow on you as you read the book (even though they all remain nonsensical to the end) and you begin to think that you do not mind reading it so much. You will remember the story for a while because of the strangeness of it.
But nowhere near his best work, The Name Of The Rose.
5/10
= = Krishna