On the first night in our cabin, I managed to blaze through the second half of Around the World in Eighty Days on my Kindle iPad app. It was the fourth Verne novel I'd read in the last two months, all of them checked out for "free" using my Kindle Unlimited subscription, which costs ten bucks a month. In each case I had checked out the AmazonClassics version, which has a distinctive cover, and usually includes the audio. I had used the audio in the past, but I find I often get too impatient and want to read faster than the audio will take me.
Around the World in Eighty Days was the first of the four Verne novels I'd read that did not include constant life-or-death situations in which the characters escape impossible dire predicaments, sometimes through means which seem beyond belief (such as ascending the column of a volcano on a raft that is being pushed up by the lava). Nevertheless those are some of the things one learns to cut slack to Verne, given his genius as futurology in his narrative.
Around the World in Eighty Days was thus much less stressful in a way. The biggest drama is about whether Fogg and Passepartout would be able to catch a certain boat that they needed, and what happened when they invariably didn't. Several of the sea voyages had a requisite moment at which a storm might overwhelm the boat and sink it, but this was small drama compared to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Throughout the book one of the things that fascinated me was the difference between the book and the Hollywood movie starring David Niven that (somewhat bizarrely) won the 1956 Academy Award for Best Picture. It is, legitimately I think, often cited as one of the least deserving Best Picture winners (don't you DARE say How Green Was My Valley or n the name of the late great John Ford) I will find you and punch your lights out).
It's not that the Hollywood movie is bad, per se. It's quite entertaining in its own way. It begins with a narrated short documentary about Verne himself before starting the story. It's clear that it won mostly because of the scale and magnitude of the production, more than the story itself, which, like most Verne stories, is not the strongest part of the work.
The strangest part about the movie, after reading the book, is the addition of an entire sequence in which Fogg and Passepartout are forced to use a hot air balloon to go onward from Paris over the Alps. This is not in the book at all. Verne skips over Europe entirely, picking up the narrative in Suez after leaving London. The balloon part of the book is clearly absurd and is shoehorned into the movie based on other Verne stories, namely Five Weeks in a Balloon and The Mysterious Island. In the movie it gives the story a gratuitous excuse to have the main duo detour into Spain so that Cantinflas, a famous Mexican comic actor, can do a spoof a bullfight. Absurd!
As for the novel, it's a fun read, although it is flawed at times by Verne's inability to consult an atlas in regard to American geography. Arkansas River in Nebraska? It goes to Verne's underlying sloppiness as a storyteller throughout all his novels, which as I said, is forgivable.
My biggest beef with the story? I simply don't buy it for one minute that Fogg would lose track of a whole day because of the International Date Line. He would have noticed this while crossing the United States. Unfortunately this is a very important point in the story, and so you have to overlook the absurdity of this in the end.
I think that will be all for Verne for now in my reading list. I have other things I want to read. Maybe I will come back and pick up a few more down the line, when I ready to face the life-and-death struggle again.
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