SOURCE: “Melting into Air,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 43, No. 1, January 11, 1996, pp. 37-9.

In the following excerpt, Dinnage remarks upon the multiple plots and allusions of The Island of the Day Before in relation to the seventeenth-century search for what today is known as the international dateline.

We know there is one branch of fiction, godfathered by Kafka and Borges, which has abandoned the pretense that it really happened for fantasy and joke, miracle and fairy tale. “It's all a magic trick,” its authors say. “See how I do it?” This is fun, and often clever; but, like other forms of modern experimenting (“A chair doesn't really look like this”), it makes it less easy than with writers of realistic fiction to sort out the masters from the copyists and the frauds. Not everyone who waves a wand is a Prospero.

The Tempest, along with...