Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel (Paperback)

by Jules Verne (Author), Richard Howard (Author) "On August 13, 1960, a portion of the Parisian populace headed for the many Metro stations from which various local trains would take them to..." (more)
Key Phrases: Uncle Huguenin, Monsieur Huguenin, Monsieur Richelot (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In 1863, Jules Verne was a young writer with one published novel under his belt and a new multibook contract with a prominent French publisher in hand. The publisher, however, rejected Verne's second manuscript, opting to bring out his Journey to the Center of the Earth instead. That manuscript apparently disappeared into a drawer, not to see the light of day again until it was rediscovered and published in 1994. Now it has been rendered into English by the eminent poet and translator Richard Howard. Verne's early books tend to feature adventure plots and a positive attitude towards technology. This novel, however, shows Verne in a darker, frankly dystopian mood. His mid-20th century Paris is an enormously wealthy society, a place of technological wonders, but, like Huxley's Brave New World, it is also a society without meaningful art. Engineering and banking are the prime industries of this civilization and, as the book's protagonist discovers, not even the most talented poet can find a place for himself unless he's willing to produce odes to blast furnaces or locomotives. While the narrative contains many startling predictions?among them fax machines, electronic calculators, automobiles and elaborate subway systems?there is little here in the way of either plot or character development. It's clear, in fact, that in opting for Journey to the Center of the Earth, Verne's publisher chose the better book. Drawings not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Verne is well known as an early science fiction writer; this novel, which was lost for 125 years, is remarkably prescient in its predictions about the technology that is omnipresent now. Set in the 1960s, though written a century earlier, the novel depicts Michel Dufrenoy as a poet and humanities scholar at sea in a crass commercial world that has strong overtones of Soviet realism. He befriends a young musician with whom he works; reconnects with his long-lost uncle, a literature professor; and even falls in love with the professor's granddaughter. But despite the kindnesses of his friends, Michel fails to succeed with the technological culture around him. Notable are the predictions about the subway, electric lights, and electronic music. A curiosity; recommended for public and academic libraries.?Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Md.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 222 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey (October 21, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 034542039X
• ISBN-13: 978-0345420398
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #508,181 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A type of sf later writers would better explore, November 25, 2002

By	Brian Taves (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

Purely as a work of literature, Paris in the Twentieth Century lacks the qualities of the best novels that have insured Verne's reputation for over a century. Nonetheless, Paris in the Twentieth Century will be of interest to readers for two primary reasons, because of its prophecies, but even more because of its early position in the development of dystopian science fiction. On the most basic, surface level, Paris in the Twentieth Century is an astonishing book for its depiction of the modern age. Written in 1863, the story is set in the Paris of the 1960s. Paris in the Twentieth Century concerns a 16-year-old, Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates, with a devotion to literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only technological writing is favored. The officially sanctioned creativity is government sponsorship of the arts, resulting in lowbrow theater for the masses.
Dufrénoy determines to be an artist, working on his own, but finds that his book of poetry is impossible to sell, and soon he is starving in the winter's cold, one of the few forces of nature that science has yet to overcome. In despair, he spends his last sous to buy violets for his beloved, but finds that she has disappeared from her apartment, evicted when her father lost his job as the university's last teacher of rhetoric. In a moving but excessively melodramatic climax, the heartbroken Dufrénoy, bereft of friends and loved ones, wanders through the frozen, mechanized, electrical wonders of Paris. The subjectivity becomes steadily more surreal as the dying artist, in a final paroxysm of despair, unconsciously circles an old cemetery. Dufrénoy encounters the modern tool of criminal execution-the electric chair (yet another scientific prediction, opposed to the guillotine of Verne's time)-before freezing to death.
The macabre imagery of this peroration to Paris in the Twentieth Century may be inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was one of Verne's principal models as a writer, and was also the subject of Verne's only literary essay-written at the time of Paris in the Twentieth Century. Poe may have also provided direct impetus for the characterization of Dufrénoy. Like his portrayal of Dufrénoy, Verne believed that Poe's potential creativity had clashed with the uncongenial background of an industrial, material society in America. The strange end of Poe's life may even have provided the idea for the bizarre climax of Paris in the Twentieth Century and the death of Dufrénoy.
Verne's prophecies of the world to come in Paris in the Twentieth Century, both in technical and cultural terms, are breathtaking in their extent and nearly unerring accuracy. Virtually every page is crowded with evidence of Verne's ability to forecast the science and life of the future, from feminism to the rise of illegitimate births, from email to burglar alarms, from the growth of suburbs to mass-produced higher education, including the dissolution of humanities departments. Perhaps Verne's most amusing error was in anticipating that the government would conduct itself in such a businesslike way as to show a dividend.
However, Verne's publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, rejected Paris in the Twentieth Century as simply unbelievable. He also disapproved of the pessimistic, dystopian tone of the novel, believing that it would not attract readers and might potentially destroy Verne's promising career after the publication of his first scientific adventure and popular success, Cinq Semaines en ballon. Not all of Hetzel's judgments were so questionable. He also recognized that from the standpoint of the requirements of novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century was structurally weak, particularly in the narrative elements Hetzel believed were so necessary in speculative fiction. While characterization was seldom Verne's strength as a writer, usually the fault was obscured by the context of the story, with an adventurous, scientific, fantastic, or comedic setting. In Paris in the Twentieth Century Verne centers his narrative, for the only time, on self-consciously artistic characters-and the results are noticeably neither credible nor intriguing.
Paris in the Twentieth Century was translated into English by Richard Howard, previously familiar to Vernians for translating into English the essays on Verne of such prominent theoreticians as Roland Barthes and Michel Butor. Howard's translation of Paris in the Twentieth Century is generally literal, faithful to the wording and syntax of Verne, to the point of preserving the flow of Verne's wording in an unwieldy manner for modern readers. However, Howard goes so far in this direction as to be unnecessarily awkward. He amplifies every nuance that surfaces from each phrase and verb conjugation in the process of translation, to the point of adding complexity that is not present in the original text (perhaps an echo of Howard's work translating many continental literary theorists). Howard thus creates more convoluted phrasing than was necessary, when a more direct and less complex style would have been more readable and still faithful to the text. Howard's most evident changes to the text are in format, such as inserting breaks in chapters where there are none. Howard also occasionally merges short paragraphs into fuller paragraphs, or consolidates brief, single-phrase sentences into longer, more properly grammatical sentences. By doing so, Howard loses some of the intended staccato effect of Verne's style and the meaning it creates; for instance, the impact of Dufrénoy expiring in the snow is lessened by combining into a single paragraph the final, closing lines of the novel.
Howard does not seem to know of the recent tradition of Verne translations over the last forty years, although his work falls squarely within the attempt to evoke a Verne closer to the original French texts than had been the case in 19th century translations. In conversation with this reviewer, Howard defended the inaccurate 19th century translations for their "wonderful tonality," and revealed that he was unaware of the serious literary studies of Verne outside of those that he had translated himself, describing Verne as analyzed only by a few "eccentrics."

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating prediction, July 6, 2001

By	Kurt A. Johnson (Marseilles, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Michel Dufrenoy is a man born out of time. Possessing the soul of an artist, he lives in a time when the artist is despised, and the industrialist is utterly triumphant. Where can Michel go to fit in? What place can an artist find in the Paris of 1960?

Jules Verne wrote this short book in 1863, but his publisher rejected it as unrealistic. In many ways, what Verne wrote was prescient. He wrote about electric lights, asphalt streets and motorcars, but he went far beyond that. He foresaw the future degradation of art ("I've even heard of a certain Courbet, at one of his last exhibitions, showed himself, face to the wall, in the performance of one of the most hygienic but least elegant actions of life!"), and the deconstruction of history in mass entertainment ("...History must be raped if she is to bear a child. And she was made to bear any number, who themselves bore no resemblance to their mother!")

This book is highly polemical in nature. Verne makes quite clear his distaste for capitalism and its concomitant mindset. Also, this story offers no great insight, but merely warns. I found the story fascinating for its seeming precognition, but did not find the story particularly entertaining. Therefore, I give this book a qualified recommendation--read this book as an interesting historical document, but not as an entertaining story.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Paris AD 1960: A World of Cold Marvels, December 31, 2004

By	James Paris "Tarnmoor" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

The story of the discovery of Jules Verne's novel PARIS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is the stuff of fantasy: The 1863 unpublished manuscript was discovered lying in a safe some 130 years later.

It tells the tale of one Michel Dufrenoy, winner of a prize in poetry at a time when poetry, indeed literature, means nothing. Thousands of books are still published, but they are all engineering and scientific works with sesquipedalian titles. The real hero, however, is the city of Paris circa 1960: a city of engineering marvels with such devices as elevators, fax machines, underground trains, and gas-powered cabs. (Curiously, this future world also contains quill pens and giant accounting ledger books with scaffolding.)

Verne's vision of the future is endlessly fascinating, especially as so many of his predictions have come true. Where the young Verne faltered, however, is his failure to display the rambunctious 19th century optimism of his later works. Instead of a triumphant tone, we have a world in which the individual who refuses to be a cog in the great works of society becomes marginalized and ultimately crushed. PARIS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is a young writer's experiment that was rejected by publishers of the day, ostensibly because its vision was too far-fetched (it isn't), but oddly not because it was pervaded with a feeling of doom (which it certainly is).

The book makes interesting reading for its insights, but fails as a story. The hero and his struggling friends are sadly short-changed.