Umberto Eco · 1994 · sea

Umberto Eco's 1994 novel. Roberto della Griva, a shipwrecked seventeenth-century nobleman, is marooned, not on a desert island but on a deserted ship, the Daphne, anchored off an island he cannot reach because he cannot swim. The island sits just across the hundred-and-eightieth meridian, in the day before. Stranded on the line between today and yesterday, Roberto fills his solitude with memories of the siege of Casale where his father died, of Paris, of love, and of an invented evil twin, in a baroque meditation on time, longitude and the unreachable.

1. 1
   Casale Monferrato

   At the siege of Casale in the Thirty Years' War, the young nobleman Roberto della Griva watches his father die and learns to see the world as a tissue of enigmas.

2. 2
   Paris

   In the salons of Paris he is schooled in love letters and natural philosophy, and drawn, as a reluctant spy, into the era's great secret race: the search for a way to fix longitude at sea.

3. 3
   The Island

   Aboard the Amaryllis he sails to the far South Pacific, is wrecked in a storm, and washes up alone on another abandoned ship anchored off a green island on the hundred-and-eightieth meridian, an island that lies, across the date line, in the day before.