Around and around the world
Kudos to Masterpiece’s new eight-part series Around the World in 80 Days, if only for nudging me to read Jules Verne’s original tale of an eccentric Englishman who sets out from London in 1872 on a strict deadline to girdle the globe, as well as to revisit Michael Todd’s Oscar-winning 1956 movie version. Bad translations and Disney movies long consigned much of Verne’s prodigious output to the realm of juvenile entertainment, in the popular mind anyway. Serious critics tell us that we should think again — that in a novel like Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) there is indeed a lot going on. The character of Phileas Fogg has layers beneath his serene reserve, as his passage around the world begins to reveal.
