Read: Extracts on Googlebooks |
|
With the words ‘Here I am, gentlemen’, Phileas Fogg snatches a day from the jaws of time to make one of literature’s great entrances.Fogg – stiff, repressed, English – assures the members of the exclusive Reform club that he will circumnavigate the world in eighty days. Together with an irrepressible Frenchman and an Indian beauty he slices through jungles and over snowbound passes, even across an entire isthmus – only to get back five minutes late. He confronts despair and suicide, but his Indian companion makes a new man of him, able to face even his club again. Dr Butcher’s stylish new translation of Around the World in Eighty Days moves as fast and as brilliantly as Fogg’s epic journey. This edition also presents important discoveries about Verne’s manuscripts, sources and cultural references.
|
Reviews:'Of the novel’s modern English versions, the best has long been the Oxford World’s Classics edition', Michael Dirda, Washington Post, Dec. 2021 ‘the best introduction that I know’, Count Piero Gondolo della Riva ‘excellent translations/critical editions . . . known internationally as a topnotch scholar . . . by far the best available’, Professor Arthur Evans, Science Fiction Studies ‘les premières éditions critiques dignes de ce nom . . . aucune édition française n'existe qui soit comparable . . . travail exemplaire', BSJV, 2000 'des versions qui sont des modèles, tant pour la qualité de la langue que pour les notes et commentaires', Professor J Chesneaux, Jules Verne (2001), p. 288 'Recommended . . . Especially useful for scholars', North American Jules Verne Society, 2004 'One of the best short essays that I've seen [on Around the World]', Professor Arthur Evans 'Elegant', Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1995 'Excellente traduction', Revue Jules Verne, no. 1, 1996, p. 96 'William Butcher has done the most of any scholar writing in English to provide a context for Around the World in Eighty Days', Gale Cengage Learning 'Fascinating analysis', Calvin Park |