Third son of Umberto Eco

“The Island the Day Before,” the third and so far last novel by Umberto Eco, is criticized by everyone and everything. Like, the third one is superfluous, the novel is boring, the island is without treasures, and the text is without a single corpse. Thus, the most fashionable European writer found himself in the position of the father of a family, whose first son ("The Name of the Rose") came out handsome and had a glorious career, the second ("Foucault's Pendulum") was both this and that, and the third ("The Island on the Eve ") turned out to be a fool. In fact, he’s a teenager (born in 1994), of course, with an idiot, but certainly not without talent.

1643 The young Italian nobleman Robert de la Grieve (a reference to Robinson Crusoe is already encrypted in his name), on the instructions of Cardinal Mazarin, goes to the Pacific Ocean, where his ship is wrecked, Robert is saved, but ends up on another abandoned ship, which is anchored opposite a certain island; It’s impossible to get to the island because Robert doesn’t know how to swim. On the ship is found a supply of provisions, a botanical garden, a bestiary-bird house, a chamber filled with clocks, Robert's non-existent brother, as well as a Jesuit monk who first looks like a goat from Defoe's book, then like Abbot Faria from Dumas, and then like Paganel from Jules Verna. This Jesuit - Caspar Vanderdrossel - is something like William of Baskerville in "The Name of the Rose", but only this time Eco does not need the services of the smart detective for long. Very soon the Jesuit disappears into the depths of the sea.

The detective that everyone expects from Eco does not exist and cannot exist - the time is not right. The 17th century is the era of Baroque art, intricate, witty and often illogical. The detective genre itself, in which everything should be consistent and coherent, was then impossible. The deductive method is despised, forgotten and discarded as too crude. The baroque detective must certainly be a poet; the mark left on the floor can be sung in hundreds of lines, but no one would think of looking at it with a magnifying glass and comparing it with the size of the suspects’ feet. Rather, with the help of prisms, lenses, crooked mirrors and other optical devices, this trace will be distorted so that it suggests more metaphors.

Umberto Eco's main profession is a semiotician, so his first two novels were also fictionalized works on sign systems. Baroque is not so much a sign system as a bizarre, rather unsystematic combination of signs. At that time, the reduction of the incompatible, the establishment of non-existent similarities and the linking of heterogeneous things were valued. What kind of semiotics is this, for mercy's sake? If a real detective did appear in “The Island,” he would have to face the completely inappropriate actions of the suspects, which do not fit into any sign system. And the main character, Robert Robinson, is constantly either daydreaming or in a state of passion. Either he was overheated, or poisoned by an underwater reptile, and most often he was drunk to death.

“We are made of the same substance as dreams,” notes Shakespeare’s Prospero. “Life is a dream,” Calderon’s Sigismundo realizes. What kind of workshop on semiotics (as Lotman called the investigations of Ekov’s heroes), what kind of deductive method could be in this dormitorium? Shh, gentlemen, don't make any noise, wake up the patients from the next department. “The dream corresponded to the rules of the Baroque, according to which even in dreams, even primarily in them, proportions must decorate the concept, exaggerations must enliven them, mysterious convergences must give substance to the story, reflections must give depth, emphases must sublime, allusions must add mystery, and puns must subtlety" (chapter "Daphne").

The baroque “island on the eve” is a burial ground of unconfirmed hypotheses, failed theories and unfinished plots. There are mysteries here, mostly natural-philosophical ones. There are no bloody corpses or world conspiracies, but natural paradoxes are presented in abundance - the mystery of longitudes, the place of the Earth in the solar system, the reversibility of time. Since science has not yet been sufficiently developed, the hypothesis that is the most ingenious (and not the most plausible) is chosen as the working one. Eco, it seems, deliberately throws up all sorts of possibilities for the development of a “normal” adventure plot: the cardinal’s spies, seafaring monks, crippled dogs. But the baroque author does not care about all this: this fat bone will later go to Dumas, Jules Verne, Stevenson, Conan Doyle. Eco is adamant. Even physical phenomena are explored here with the help of metaphor: to name a riddle beautifully means to reveal it a little. Longitude can be sought using precise clocks (but this will happen later, in an era when all baroque theories will seem simply “absurd” and will be thrown into the attic of European culture), or it can be done using the principle of universal Sympathy, attracting like with like.

In fact, there are several detectives in “The Island” - Robert in almost every chapter (and there are 40 of them) enters into dialogues with some poet or scientist, and they are all trying to unravel the book of Nature. One proves the veracity of the story of the flood, another talks about the sympathy of various substances, the third convinces Robert that it is always yesterday on the island, since it is located on the 180th meridian (the title of the novel came from this space-time paradox). The meridian can be found if you regularly injure a special dog, the double can be caught if you write a novel with his participation, and you can find the Beautiful Lady left in Paris if you see the Red-Colored Dove, apparently living on the island. This is a baroque detective story, if you really need a detective story - there are many secrets and many clues in it. There is a bad ending here, from the point of view of a “normal” positivist detective, but a whole scattering of brilliant “concetto” (a term in Baroque treatises denoting a witty idea, a bold decision, a combination of the incompatible).

Eco's colonial product - "The Island on the Eve" - ​​sold poorly. Most likely, this is his last high-profile negotiation. Further, like a real Prospero, he must renounce his novels and return to normal, philistine life. “All are sinners, all await forgiveness, may your judgment be merciful.”

PS The translation by Elena Kostyukovich deserves a completely baroque cascade of praises - a bold undertaking and brilliantly carried out.