Rating: 
Summary: Disapointing!
Review: A slim historical fact awkwardly dressed in a mildly-interesting stor
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Prose, Although Unnecessarily Pretentious
Review: I *love* Umberto Eco. Not just his popular works, but his articles. Here's a guy who loves writing, and he knows how to show it. He's erudite, but usually he can use his erudition to write entertaining yarns, even when writing short stories (his "pastiches") or scholarly articles.
Here we have, though, a novel that would have fared better as a monography or a collection of articles. The ideas become the main characters of the work, but a novel is supposed to be entertaining, and a novel where the characters exist only as vehicles to express certain ideas becomes a chore to read--unless one is truly fascinated by the ideas per se.
What Eco seems to be trying, though, is not to examine medieval ideas from our point of view, but to get into the head of the main character and see the world through the eyes of a person who lived in those times. Needless to say, all these ideas happen to be tied in with theological considerations that are, for the most part (and thankfully) not too relevant to the modern linguist, and perhaps not even to the modern medievalist.
All in all, it's a book worthy of a careful read, but it fails where "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" delivered: it's just not entertaining. Get it from your local library.
PS: The translation is excellent. I'd dare to say the English version is as good as the Italian original.
Rating:
Summary: Umberto Eco is smarter than you...
Review: ...I can say that with near certainty. His professional field is the esoteric world of semiotics, or basically the science and philosophy of symbols - the same sort of thing that Dan Brown called "symbology" in his pathetic novels. That being said, it's easy to see in Eco's writing an intense affection for mystery, for illusion, for double and treble meanings, for duplicity, for hairpin turn endings. "The Island..." tells two stories, one of a young man's meandering life through the pitfalls of a Renaissance existence, and the other the surreal set piece of a man, suddenly awakening on a stranded ship, with a strange island in the distance. He doesn't know how he got there, where he is, or how to get home. Either of these tales might make really entertaining novellas, but these two odd birds are joined at the hip by making the main character the same man. And to confuse us more, we segue back and forth between the stories, keeping us always off balance slightly. About two thirds of the way through, it simply became more work than it was worth to hang on to this heeling ship of a novel, but I plowed ahead to the ending, eager for the release.
If all this makes it sound like a wasted reading experience, I assure you it wasn't. Very few people can put you in the past quite as effectively as Eco (Patrick O'Brian can actually do it better) and I saw this world in such vivid color it nearly made me blink. I didn't have to invent faces or accents for the characters, they leapt off the page. Eco's writing is luxuriant, erudite, expansive - you will either learn a lot of new words or quit looking them up after a while - and I can't imagine a better read to really take you completely out of your present existence and plunk you down someplace entirely new and very strange, much like our protagonist found himself. It's just that, for all the sound and fury, not a lot seems to really happen, and at the end of the day I felt that I wanted something that wasn't there. Perfect vacation or travel-time reading.
Rating: 
Summary: the Land of the Dead
Review: At some point, nearing the end of the novel, someone arrives in the Land of Dead where souls suffer by deteriorating at infinitely slow rates and not having the ability to cease to exist completely. This is a pretty decent metaphor for how I felt approaching the last 100 pages of this book.
I am someone who absolutely loved both "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" and I, naturally, expected more of the same. If you're like me, you will not find it here. Maybe about 20% of the book is genuinely enjoyable, and it offers some juicy tid-bits thrown in that are only appreciable by people intimately familiar with "The Three Musketeers," which, fortunately, I am. As for the rest, I often caught myself asking "Why am I still reading this?" For all my earnest suffering and faith, there was no payoff in the end.
Rating: 
Summary: A multitude of books in one - but not for everyone
Review: OK, this book has gotten a very wide range of mixed reviews. Basically, the deal seems to be this - after "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucalt's Pendulum," one might have thought of Eco as the writer with the trademark combination of erudition, history, intellectual theory and popular narration.However, this book is none of that - it is a very strange blend of some of these features, but in a different way that ends up being unappreciated by many.
There is no essential plot to the book. It is about Roberto, a young nobleman who becomes cast away on an abandonned ship. What follows is a wide array of the memories of his life thus far, his quirky thoughts and happening on the ship, as well as the reasons why he is on the ship. The result feels like 5 or 6 books stuck together - which is interesting but hard to read. Thus, the first book might be entitled "The Anatomy of Rennaisance Sieges", the second "Paris as an Intellectual Flowerbed", the third "The Hunt for Longitude as a Means of Conquering the World", the fourth "A Jesuit Perspective of Metaphysics" and the fifth "The Yearning for the Orange Dove". All of these describe each of the implicit sections of the book, but don't do it justice.
As can be seen from the titles, the book parades you through the various intellectual milestones of the Rennaisance, from theology to metaphysics to astronomy and the history of science. If you are interested in any of these, the book is a worthwhile read. Also, despite the style being deliberately obscure, I felt Eco's signature playful manner of rearranging ideas shine through.
Also, unlike previous books, we have a more traditional protagonist - and I enjoyed identifying and getting to like Roberto in his idealism, slightly-misguided intellectualism and quirky worldview. All of this is characterised by his desire for the Orange Dove (towards the end of the book), where I found emotional overtones that are rare in Eco.
On the down side, it is definitely hard to read - at times it seems like it's completely deliberate and that's annoying. The highly fragmented nature doesn't help either. If you do read it, it helps if you're a fast reader and can take a short time to do it in - otherwise you'll end up like me, with flashes of insight from each day of reading, but because of the struggle, it becomes a long chain of flashes that are hard to connect together.
I liked it but I can see why many didn't. This is the book for you if you don't mind:
1)putting aside prior perceptions of Eco
2)a deliberately hard read and
3)fragmented ideas (where it's more up to the reader to make sense of it all)
Rating:
Summary: Not up to Eco's par...
Review: I found the premise of this book to be very intriguing! It made me very interested in the philosophical idea of the antipodes and the search for understanding longitude. In fact, if you have read Dava Sovel's "Longitude," many of the absurd methods Eco discusses in this book for possibilities to find longitude were actually mentioned in Sovel's book as being real. The race for longitude could be comparable to the race to harness nuclear energy.Roberto's vivid imagination and his ability to make imagination reality is machinery that is used again in Baldolino, with better success. Like I said the premise of the book was great, and could have lead to a great book, but the ending was certainly lacking. By the end it did not have the momentum to go anywhere and therefore fizzled out into monotony. It is missing the great mystery that fueled The Name of the Rose through its last pages. This book took me at least two years of periodic reading and it was by pure will to complete the book that I did finish it. And when I did, I felt that I had wasted my time. Stick to The Name of the Rose and Bauldolino instead.
Rating: 
Summary: A curl-up-with-your-dictionary, scientific jewel of a poem.
Review: _________
Fluff or not? NOT.
_________ Robert de la Griva, our protagonist is first shipwrecked then washed up on a deserted ship anchored off a mysterious Island. Our story follows the rantings of this slightly unhinged and lonely, lovesick, sailor. With equal energy he pines over his immaginary love and yearns for the safety of the island within tantalizing proximity to his lonely outpost. Langauge in all its complexity and glory, history with its heroes and discoveries, love, poetry, death, and disappointment - they're all here. Just beware, when you set out to enjoy this book, be ready to keep a good dictionary handy. +: immaginative, unconventional, thought provoking, beautiful, fun, poetic, lots of new words to learn
-: not a light read, numerous unfamiliar words really required me to stop often and use my trusty Webster's
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