The Island of the Day Before
by Umberto Eco

List Price: $14.95
Pages: Format:
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0140259198
Publisher: Penguin USA

Umberto Eco was born in 1932 in the Italian province of Piedmont, a mountainous area whose inhabitants are known for their independent spirit and for an inclination toward the phlegmatic French – rather than the passionate Italian – character. Eco cites his upbringing amid this culture as a source of the unique temperament in his writing. "Certain elements remain as the basis for my world vision," he says. "A skepticism and aversion to rhetoric. Never to exaggerate, never to make bombastic assertions." Eco's grandfather claimed to be a foundling, and that he was given the surname Eco, an acronym for ex caelis oblatus (offered by the heavens), by an inventive civil servant.

Schooled as a lawyer, Eco abandoned that vocation for the study of medieval philosophy and literature. After receiving his doctorate in philosophy, Eco tried his hand at journalism and soon acquired a significant reputation as a critic of Italian media and culture. By the late seventies, Eco had established himself as a semiotician, and it was in the context of that discipline that the idea for his first novel emerged. "I began writing prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk," he explains. The Name of the Rose (1984) essentially is a detective story set in a medieval monastery. No one, including Eco, was prepared for the novel's immense international popularity. Thrust into the global limelight, yet committed to continuing his academic studies, Eco found himself wondering whether his success was a fluke or evidence of a deeper talent. Pulling together many of the images and ideas untouched by his first novel but left in his mind, he began assembling another work, Foucault's Pendulum. Again, the novel was an immediate success upon its publication in 1989.

Eco continues to teach and publish in the field of semiotics. He has been awarded numerous academic and scientific degrees and appointments, as well as literary prizes and decorations. He currently maintains two residences in Italy: a sprawling summer home in the hills near Rimini, and an apartment in Milan, where he lives with his wife and his collection of more than 30,000 books. Eco's library, like his life, encompasses a wide array of eclectic interests, from St. Thomas to James Joyce to Superman. "I am a polychronic personality," he admits. "I will start many things at the same time, merging them together to form a continuous interconnection.... If I don't have many things to do, I am lost."

top of the page