The Island of the Day Before

The Island of the Day Before (Italian title: L'isola del giorno prima) is a 1995 novel by Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco that tells the life story of a young man, Roberto della Griva, as he is shipwrecked aboard a fully provisioned but (apparently) abandoned ship anchored in a bay in the South Pacific. The narrative proceeds through a series of flashbacks, often interspersed with commentary by an unknown narrator, calling into question truth, reality, and the stability of meaning.

• Dissimulating means drawing a veil composed of honest shadows, which does not constitute falsehood but allows truth some respite. The rose seems beautiful because at first sight it dissimulates, pretending to be so fleeting, and although it is frequently said of mortal beauty that is seems not of this earth, it is simply a corpse dissimulated by the favor of youth.
  • Source: Chapter 11, "The Art of Prudence"

• From the way he recalls it on the Daphne, I tend to believe that at Casale, while he lost both his father and himself in a war of too many meanings and of no meaning at all, Roberto learned to see the universal world as a fragile tissue of enigmas, beyond which there was no longer an Author; or if there was, He seemed lost in the remaking of Himself from too many perspectives. If there Roberto had sensed a world now without any center, made up only of perimeters, here he felt himself truly in the most extreme and most lost of peripheries, because, if there was a center, it lay before him, and he was its immobile satellite.
  • Source: Chapter 14, "A Treatise on the Science of Arms"
  • The narrator commenting on the protagonist, Roberto, after a flashback in which his father was killed in battle and before describing at length his current predicament of being shipwrecked aboard a ship.

• Indeed, as he sees it distant not only in space but also (backwards) in time, from this moment on, whenever he mentions that distance, Roberto seems to confuse space and time, and he writes, "The bay, alas, is too yesterday," and ,"How much sea separates me from the day barely ended," and even, "Threatening rainclouds are coming from the Island, whereas today it is already clear . . . . But if the Island moves ever farther away, is it still worth the effort to learn to reach it?
  • Source: Chapter 27, "The Secrets of the Flux and Reflux of the Sea"

• Oh Love, Love, Love, have you not punished me enough already, is this not a death undying?
  • Source: Chapter 29, "The Soul of Ferrante"
  • Roberto, after reliving (via flashback) his beloved mistakenly ending up in the arms of another through subterfuge.