Around the World in 80 Days

Jules Verne is the most widely translated author in the world, after Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. He wrote 54 "Voyages Extraordinaires."

The cheesy 1959 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth, with Pat Boone and a runaway goose in a papier-mâché studio underworld, was less fun. In this glorious new adaptation, the novel’s Detective Fix who follows Fogg around the globe suspecting he is a criminal, is now a very modern young lady, the Titian-haired (a wig) Abigail Fix, a dogged reporter for the London Daily Telegraph, who reports back to the newspaper on Fogg’s progress. The boat was built in England in 1939, in a traditional, even old-fashioned design, and its interior would not have been out of place in a Jules Verne novel: Wood beams, a kerosene lamp, shelves full of books. To find my way across the unmarked sea, I learned celestial navigation: measuring the angles between the sun and the stars and the ocean horizon with a sextant; a mechanical contraption with calibrated knobs, mirrors, made of heavy brass, in a beautiful wooden box. And David Tennant (Broadchurch, Dr. Who) is a perfect Fogg. Part prig, part Indiana Jones. He is rubber-faced, by turns gloomy, outraged, deliriously enthusiastic, and athletically committed to his mission. But none of these associations kindled a traveling itch in the boy. But in the English-speaking world, “Jules Verne” became a notion of genre fiction for children’s books, a franchise for translators who abridged, altered, even invented parts of his works. But in his day, Verne was at the cutting edge of modernism. The Verne family home, on the banks of the Loire, offered the young Jules a constant view of passing ships. My mother was a painter who loved the Impressionists. In Riverside, CT, they got to know another American family that briefly lived across the street. We’d sailed across the Atlantic on the Cunard liner Caronia: six days aboard a throbbing, elegant vessel from an already vanishing epoch, with a movie theater, swimming pool, vaulted dining rooms, frescoed walls, deck chairs from which to view the passing, limitless ocean. I discovered Jules Verne when I was home sick from school, aged 10 or 11.