Wonderful Jules Verne

Literature textbooks often speak of Jules Verne (when they speak!) With a certain condescension. If they recognize it to have invented science fiction, it remains to them a colorful entertainer whose stories would go mainly to teenagers, an author not devoid of talent, certainly, but we can not put on the same plane as Stendhal and Maupassant. Personally, I find this intolerable intellectual snobbery. Like all snobbery, too! Jules Verne, to me, is an absolute marvel. Do not ask me to find a fault or issue for him the shadow of a subject, I would be quite incapable! I like his prose clear, precise, lyrical. I like his picturesque characters. I like that give me escape his novels, the energy that inhabits and philosophy that emerges. It's simple! Chez Jules Verne, I like everything! It is a cure for boredom, gloom, a declaration of war to routine, and especially a great antidote to bad literature, one that believes deeply because it is obscure or subtle because it is nonsensical . If one forced me, the knife at his throat, to prefer a book in his voluminous work, I probably would opt Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for the ocean fascinated me and I love the way speaks Verne but in truth I devote an equal admiration for this "Journey to the Center of the Earth" I had read a child in the green library and I just reread fifteen years later a more mature but equally amazed eye.

Linear, the plot of the novel is very simple. A professor Lidenbrock, Hamburg, accidentally discovers a mysterious parchment rune in which an Icelandic alchemist reveals the existence of a passage leading to the center of the Earth. Truth or fable? Only one way to find out! Accompanied by his nephew Axel, Lidenbrock takes the path of Iceland, where the aforementioned transition is found, buried in the heart of a volcano ... and crazy adventure begins! What such "pitch" can not make, of course, is the poetry that emerges from this account, because even if the progress of science and the advancement of knowledge have invalidated some of the theories he exhibits it still continues to exhale an irresistible charm, the eternal charm of the unexpected, of discovery, of wonder. What a great idea, anyway, than seek mystery and the unknown, not on an unlikely planet, in the depths of a distant galaxy, but right here, under our feet, in the bowels of this good Old Earth! Must be keen on geology or caving to taste these pages? Of course not! Just like the beautiful stories told in an elegant and dynamic prose. As Dumas, like Wells, like Stevenson, his brothers in literature and imagination, Jules Verne is first and foremost a great storyteller who believes in the power of words, their magic, their power of enchantment. The read is entering this magic, is to let yourself be enchanted by these spells is to abdicate his disbelief for an hour or two. In short, it is to say yes to dream and fantasy. Personally, I ask nothing better!