Cinq Semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) by Jules Verne.

In 1862, after getting a refusal for semi-autobiographical Backward Trip to England and Scotland, Jules Verne presented another composition to the same man, Pierre-Jules Hetzel–who and whose enterprise will become a constant publishing house for the writer–a manuscript Five Weeks in a Balloon, which was accepted and it became the author’s first released book, and, eventually, the beginning of his series The Extraordinary Voyages, which will make sixty-two in all (but he will witness fifty-four of them).

Five Weeks in a Balloon is about two Englishman and one Scotsman who decided to discover the source of the Nile via a transport that a title informs. The book’s narration maintains in a light tone, which in behavior and dialogue between heroes turning the composition suitable for kids. That easygoing is lovable when it comes to the adventure of personages.

Jules Verne was masterful in prose. He makes reading of him smooth and sliding. Unfortunately, there are much harming. The author puts silly metaphors. As that describing Joe, who is the servant of Dr. Fergusson, the man who initiated the adventure. Verne writes that you could cut Joe on pieces, but he wouldn’t change his mind about his master was presented rough in that contest of the character’s loyalty. Or the Frenchman inserts needless embedding, such as the anchor of the balloon leaving a trace in tall grass alike to a ship in an ocean, which disappears then. He writes a futile fact with personages that food supplies will last for long, because dozens pages ago provide a detailed description and the doctor’s calculation of the containment of the balloon with their measured weights. Verne becomes repetitive in heroes’ remark of how everything looks small from the air and the need to resume the water for the balloon. And what does make the Frenchman as a failed writer is that you see his sharing of his learnt from magazines, books, and other sources about science and geography in describing areas, real adventurers (after that he enters a conversational sentence “Let’s see what was doing these men”, which can’t be appropriate in this narrating), or this can be a describing of the delicious parts of elephant after the Scotsman Dick Kennedy kills a respective being, and also Verne does embedding in this aspect about other animals that not present in the scene. The author sees as the necessity to mention safety acts for saving the balloon from fire. All that reads as rewriting of magazines’ articles.

NB. Verne describes the cruel death of Eugene Maizan, but doesn’t mention a delicate element here. Either he didn’t know it or decided to put it aside. This can accept as information Dr. Fergusson had in availability, though it was hard to take him as the personage to that place of reading.

I believe there were Verne’s thoughts again, which he couldn’t cover as professional, when Dr. Samuel Fergusson makes a misjudging reasoning about why every part of the world became a paramount and the dislike of America.

Jules Verne lacked complete needful knowledge and understanding of psychology. Kennedy gets a fever, but he recovers after Dr. Fergusson ascends the balloon up to the sun, which cures his hunter friend. Behavior of animals can be unnatural: antelopes raise their heads after every sip due to sensing of danger and that elephant could jump. I assume, it was a thick rope, in claiming about impossibility to cut it by knife. That can be taken as characters’ opinion, whereas in actuality that can do it with efforts. Verne made a mistake many times writing “east” instead of “west”, because the protagonists would move to Asia by these winds.

The author doesn’t succeed as a teller. He overdramatizes in extreme situations too much. It seemed as hopeless, yet that was not actually. The balloon in danger by multiple thunderstorms, unsafe in the sky now and on the ground, but the doctor doesn’t begin with initial right thing as flying up, leaving the clouds under them. Or Kennedy hits an elephant’s eye, who turns sideways and that opens for the hunter an opportunity to make his, as will be informed, the last shot, which will into heart. However, he has a plethora of bullets afterward.

The book includes contriving that sometimes can add naivety. A tribe with a primal mind, which has muskets, but they don’t understand that their “sick” chief is alcoholic. Another African savages is demonstrated trembling at a shot into the air from a single gun, suggesting they are not acquainted with technology, but they release arrows and slugs soon. It makes their escape in the beginning as confusing. Moreover, that later trouble came after Kennedy hit a wooden hat of one person by the bullet of his arm. Logically, the tribe was supposed to approach on their boats. It was in place when the story was also dry. Characters discover the origin of the Nile, but putting a sudden fact that it was found by other man (bringing up about a real person Andrea Debono who did that in reality), whose initials Dr. Fergusson detects and deciphers to his accompanying people. What is the point if that discovery was made? Verne just did rewriting of read.

A delirious conversation between heroes has Joe saying that being eaten by his two friends is better than by Negroes was accepted by Dr. Fergusson, but the adventure initiator adds that his servant insinuates on feeding him well. His subordinate utters aloofly that a man is an egoistic animal. I already was with lost necessity to read this composition entirely. That place was a corroboration, and I didn’t continue after chapter XIX.