samuelflet117a

I don't know if this book would deserve five stars if not for the fact that immediately after reading it, I read Labyrinths. Spotting all of the Borges in Eco's books has suddenly become a fun task, and this book somehow manages to incorporate all of his most popular themes and elements without being overbearing. A man in the 1600s is shipwrecked during a wild storm, only to find himself saved and then trapped on a derelect ship. Over the course of his stay on the Daphne, as he learns it is called, he reflects on the events in his life that lead him to this fate. As he slowly decends into madness, we get to watch him connect theology, philosophy, quantum mechanics, and a theory of language into a rudimentary notion of time travel and the infinite-worlds thingy. The balance between the actual plot and Eco's philosophizing is held kind of haphazardly, but whenever it feels like he is going too far off on a tangent, he has his narrator (a seventeenth century gentleman who is relating the story from some memoirs he found) remind you that this is also, in many ways, a fiction, and that he has the right to do whatever the hell he damn well wants. This is Eco, so it has an ending that just sort of happens, but it still feels satisfying by the time you put it down. I enjoyed it more than anything I have read by him, but I'm going to have to re-read his other stuff now that I have Labyrinths worming its way through my brain.

2022-11-14 17:21