Translated from the Italian by William Weaver 513 pp.
Every age gets the classics it deserves.
If we do, we will not only know the pleasures of a profound and ingenious story artfully told but will experience Renaissance battles, love poems and sea journeys in the age of exploration. Shipwrecked among archaic scientific nightmares and failed beginnings and dead ends of technology, we will recover the perennial hope of making sense of what happens to us. In a world of metaphors, surface means all. This is an encyclopedic novel, lushly illuminating the Baroque era so deeply embedded in our own. All this is relevant to this complicated, hilarious and despondent tale of a poor shipwrecked Italian, a photophobe with weak eyes, lost in the tropics.