Most Helpful Customer Reviews
80 of 84 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Different Versions?, June 19, 2005
Yes there are different versions, The best one is the original in French. There are more than one translations into english, one with the Main character's name as Harry, the other as Axel.
I read the 'Harry' version first, but only partway through as it was terrible! I thought Verne was a bad writter or something. But, when I was older, I found another copy (Puffin Classics btw), and I thought I'd give it another go. That was one of the best books I had ever read, it funny and imaginative. The characters even had character!
Well, I looked into it, and compared my new version with the first book I had read and both of them with the original. Mine was pretty close. The names were kept the same, most of the sentences were similar in structure (so that someone like me who can't read french could tell that they were the same book).
The 'Harry version' however, invented entire chapters out of thin air, discarded others and changed significant plot points. I hope this helps some of you decide which one to get, and that there is more than one translation.
If the book starts with:
"ON 24 May 1863, a Sunday, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, came rushing back towards his little house at No.19 Konigstrasse, one of the oldest streets..."
You know you have the good version.
Otherwise, I love this book and would recomend it to anyone, whether a science fiction fan or not.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Three explorers go to the center of the earth, August 1, 1999
By A Customer
This is a classic novel by Jules Verne. In the story, Professor Hardwigg and his nephew Harry discover an ancient parchment by an alchemist named Arne Saknussemm. They travel to Iceland and climb an extinct volcano called Sneffels. With them is the Icelandic hunter Hans. They journey into the center of the earth, in which Harry gets lost. They come upon and ocean and cross it. While they are on the sea they witness a battle of ancient sea monsters. Eventually they are thrown out of a volcano on Stromboli, an island in Italy. This was a wonderful book, but sometimes it went into too much detail. Still, a classic five star book. I don't see why anyone would give it 4 1/2 stars. It is simply absurd. I recommened this book to anyone with a good imagination.
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The science has aged hard, but it's still a good story, June 6, 2010
This kindle edition is based on the 1871 translation which slightly abridged and altered Verne's original (for example, the Professor is here named Hardwigg, rather than the original's Lidenbrock, and his niece is here named Gretchen rather than Grauben). That's probably the most generally known English translation (it's the one I read obsessively as a child), and it's still a great read, but sticklers for textual accuracy might want to do a little more searching.
As to the novel itself, while unquestionably one of Verne's masterpieces in terms of story, it's probably the one that's aged the hardest of all Verne's works, and almost all of the science in this text has been exploded, modified, or simply changed by the intervening hundred and fifty-odd years of scientific development. Because Verne was in part intending this book to be a source of scientific education, the characters spend a lot of time talking about geology, archaeology, etc., to each other, and since most of that's outdated now, modern readers may want to skip over the more scientific chunks of the book and simply read it as an exploration tale.
From that perspective, the most interesting thing about this book might be that it's arguably the progenitor of the "Lost Prehistoric World" genre, and readers who want more in that vein might want to look up later books that focused more squarely on modern-explorers-in-dinosaur-country stories, such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, or Edgar Rice Burrough's novel _The Land that Time Forgot_ or his _Pellucidar_ series (explicitly set in the hollow interior of the globe).
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