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Title: Bloated
Review: I wanted to like this book, but ultimately it is just too long, too confusing, and too self-indulgent to like. It revolves around a marooned man (marooned on a ship--while looking at an unreachable island) who confuses his own imaginings with reality--and confuses us a bit along with him. It seems to me that Eco took every little sophist philosophical musing he ever had and tucked it somewhere in this book. Clever wordplay, clever ideas--marooned on a ship, e.g. Christ trapped on the Island and waiting to be freed, e.g., all are thrown in as if in a blender. In the end we're left with a bloated dead body of a book. Unfortunate, if better edited and with 150 pages taken out, it might have been great.
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