The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.
Among them are the books Twenty thousand leagues under the sea and Around the world in eighty days by the French author Jules Verne.
The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Jules Verne.
Among Verne’s best-loved novels are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; The Mysterious Island; Around the World in Eighty Days; Journey to the Center of the Earth; and From the Earth to the Moon.
Most of Verne’s most celebrated books involve science fantasy. Whether exploring space or the depths of the sea, Verne’s heroes have become identified with an adventurous spirit that makes new discoveries.
Celebrating this popularity, in 1961 an impact crater on the far side of the Moon was named Jules Verne. In 2008, the European Space Agency launched the Jules Verne ATV, a spacecraft intended to supply the International Space Station. Also on board the Jules Verne ATV was an edition of From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, Around the Moon.
An Artificial Intelligence conversational character robot has been named Jules in honor of Jules Verne. Although he is sometimes also called the Father of Science Fiction, this title has been disputed with other writers, especially H. G. Wells.
For many years Verne was dismissed as a mere writer of adventure stories, but in the past half-century many French intellectuals have expressed fascination with the ideas in his work. Among these influential admirers of Verne include such authors as Roland Barthes, Michel Butor, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. New translations into English have also helped foreign readers enjoy Verne, since the original 19th century translations were clumsy and inaccurate. As the bestselling novelist Michael Crichton noted:
Verne’s prose is lean and fast-moving in a peculiarly modern way … [but] Verne has been particularly ill-served by his English translators. At best they have provided us with clunky, choppy, tone-deaf prose. At worst—as in the notorious 1872 ‘translation’ [of Journey to the Center of the Earth] published by Griffith & Farran—they have blithely altered the text, giving Verne’s characters new names, and adding whole pages of their own invention, thus effectively obliterating the meaning and tone of Verne’s original.
Just as many space engineers today credit the TV show Star-Trek for making them aware of space travel, many scientists who read Verne as youngsters pay tribute to his inspiration. Technical inventors and explorers such as Simon Lake,William Beebe, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Fridtjof Nansen, Wernher von Braun, Guglielmo Marconi, Yuri Gagarin, Igor Sikorsky, Robert Goddard, Edwin Hubble, Édouard-Alfred Martel, Norbert Casteret, and Richard E. Byrd all admired Verne. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders, the American astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, agreed, and Borman even stated:
In a very real sense, Jules Verne is one of the pioneers of the space age.
Verne is considered the second most-translated writer in the world, after Agatha Christie, the author of mysteries. This may explain his wide influence. Among important writers who have been inspired by his books are Arthur Rimbaud, Eugène Ionesco, Raymond Roussel, Jean Cocteau, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Georges Perec, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Blaise Cendrars, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Aymé, and Arthur C. Clarke. The author of 2001: a Space Odyssey, Clarke commented:
Jules Verne had already been dead for a dozen years when I was born. Yet I feel strongly connected to him, and his works of science fiction had a major influence on my own career. He is among the top five people I wish I could have met in person.
The noted English novelist Margaret Drabble commented in 2007:
When I was a child, I had a passion for Jules Verne and was particularly in love with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I reread this thrilling tale recently, expecting to be disappointed, but found myself as enraptured as I had been when I was 9 years old. I can date this precisely, as I still have my copy, given to me by “Mummy and Daddy, Christmas 1948.” This is one of the greatest of adventures, and I don’t mind the flashes of James Mason as Captain Nemo that occasionally intrude. It was a great film too. There is something slightly guilty and regressive about returning to childhood reading, and I indulge in it more as I get older. Over the past months I have immersed myself in Verne, journeying with him to the center of the earth, to the moon, to the North Pole, to the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. It has been a binge, a plunge, a wallow. As I read I transform myself into a submariner, an explorer, a geologist, just as I used to do when I was a child, curled up in a large armchair or reading under the bedclothes with a torch. My carefully preserved copy, published in 1946 in Cleveland, has beautiful illustrations of all these creatures and seascapes. I used to be somewhat ashamed of my love of Verne, but have recently discovered that he is the darling of the French avant-garde, who take him far more seriously than we Anglo-Saxons do. So I’m in good company.
For the 1956 film adaptation of Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, the director Michael Todd borrowed one of the royal barges of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej when on location in Bangkok. As a boat carrying Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg travels past Bangkok, the royal barge appears onscreen, 155-feet long with a solid gold throne, rowed by 70 oarsmen. The rowing crew rehearsed for months for this brief film appearance. In 1949, the King provided some songs which he had composed for a Broadway show produced by Todd, and they remained on friendly terms thereafter.
Later, Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, a 2005 television movie, was filmed in Thailand. It tells of six soldiers who escape from a Civil War prison camp in Richmond, Virginia. Traveling by hot air balloon, they arrive at an unknown Pacific island. On the island they find monsters, pirates, and Captain Nemo – played by Patrick Stewart. The whole film was shot in Krabi, even scenes that were meant to illustrate battles from the American Civil War. It was felt that the landscape of the Andaman coast with its caves and beaches was ideal for representing Verne’s mysterious island.
Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island employed many Thai filmmakers and technicians, in part to save the expense of flying over American experts from Hollywood. The film was a success and showed the wider world that Thai film crews were able to achieve a high standard in varied subject matter.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)