Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) by Jules Verne.

Captain Nemo would be a mighty personality if original ideas of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas were realized and had a masterful writer. Verne didn’t want to accept the changes that Hetzel required to make. It became a first time when the writer began to argue with the publisher. The initial image of the captain of the submarine Nautilus was a Pole who fought for independence of his country against Russian Empire in unsuccessful January Uprising of 1863-1864, in which he also lost wife while his kids died in Siberia. This made him to create an underwater machine and take a path of revenge by destroying Russian ships. Hetzel feared it would harm Franco-Russian diplomatic relations and wouldn’t attract Russian readers, so he required to turn the character as a fighter against slavery. The French writer couldn’t accept it, responding that Nemo in this case could simply join Grant’s army in American Civil War. Their disagreement led to that the Nautilis’ leader became a character of nameless origin and aims, but Verne did a little concession by endowing the hero with a fact that he is an Indian.

A book reads as a recollection of alcoholic who never comes to sobriety. It takes action from 1866-1868. The Mysterious Island, a sequel which appears in 1875–four years after the release of a complete edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas–which covers the years 1865-1869 and claims that occurs sixteen years after the events of the first novel. It explained by that Verne didn’t care about these aspects. He narrates something causing the destroying of ships. A lead character, Doctor Aronnax, believes it does a cetacean creature narwhal. Captain Faraggut doesn’t believe in existence of an animal in making this claim twice, but later he expresses that going to kill it. The protagonist admits in the beginning that a ship on which will hunting is badly equipped, but he speaks favorable about it in further chapters. The French author confuses the dates: 3 or 4 July was a departure from New York, whereas 30 July is considered as three weeks having passed. Then the following date is 30 June, and he continues from there.

The French writer’s characterizing of a personage is always a resume file, where usually include such words that this hero has courage, a clever mind and et cetera of that positive. He never could give life and describe the inner thoughts of characters; in this place is always perceives as filling the space.

One of his heroes in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas had this: “I can only compare him to a powerful telescope combined with a cannon always ready to go off.” Verne’s metaphors, as everything else, in showing.

Verne can’t help but embed encyclopedic facts in a desire to show his knowledge. He writes as a police report about a ship’s speed, lengths and capacity. Aronnax’s ride through New York with a detailed itinerary that has no a necessity. The narration is a first-person, but the main personage of the novel spills his scientific assumptions that will proof wrong later. Reasonably, a man who tells his story, wouldn’t mention these long details, but the Frenchman had another goal.

I could accept a possibility that a professor has conversations with a harpooner who is an intelligent person. I can’t do this with everything since leaving New York.

The ship contacts another vessel that asks for the help of the harpooner, which coming, in that wide ocean, they expected. Gladly, Verne didn’t describe those whales.

It could be an intriguing read in a period when submarines were in the early stages of development if the Frenchman were a talented writer. He was obsessed with dramatizing, which, as is known from his other books, always sacrifices logic. He wants to present a thing as the cetacean and makes a behavior alike to that animal, in which a tail beats the water, but that can’t work with the submarine. I could understand if it were wagging.

It looked that Jules Verne held his antagonism toward the USA. There were two American scientists expressing a delirious theory about the cause of ships’ destruction, but everything was alright in the New York part, and captain Faraggut had these resume qualities. However, the latter becomes what can be characterized as Verne’s Stereotypical American. The speed of the vessel that he controls is six and ½ atmosphere. It is not enough to reach the cetacean monster. He commands to extend it to ten, which, as Aronnax says, can blow the ship up. The protagonist considers it as an “American order”. A little bit later, Faraggut confesses that will chase, even it will explode his vessel. No care about life, as it was in Verne’s book before.

The writer should have been more calculated and don’t write, “the shot passed several feet above the cetacean, half a mile away,” and that the next sailor hits the target from that punt-gun, but a shell jumps two miles aside. Furthermore, I can’t believe in the absence of commonsense on this ship. The crew spends hours chasing, only deciding to begin shooting when the “animal” stopped, but only two shots were fired from many weapons. The second shot doesn’t halt the movement, and the captain believes that a harpoon can work here, which is a less powerful remedy.

It ends that the mysterious power ramming them. Aronnax finds himself in the water and claims that can swim, but the writer contradicts on place, writing that he drowns. It doesn’t occur because his servant saves him.

If the ship didn’t sink, only the rudder was damaged, but those are just words of the professor’s man who heard them after the colliding. I can’t believe that such attack killed the whole crew (except the harpooner, of course). These two heroes swim away without having a thought about boats on the vessel, which were mentioned before (and they reasonably must be). Verne likes to dramatize. The doctor’s servant drags his master who has “violent crumps” after eight hours, which could be resolved by simple movement of limps, but I am not sure about possibility of a situation itself. Then the Frenchman writes, “Although I tried to destroy all hope, indeed to fall into the deepest despair…” in which no necessity for a first word. It was in a stance when Aronnax couldn’t lose a straight and fainted a little after that, but he comes to consciousness and is able to talk normally, though he lost that ability not so long ago. He gets to know that touches a metal surface on which the harpooner stayed for three hours. It is unknown about the rest five hours because, as can see, it is not a thing in which Verne was accurate. The harpooner was on the steel hull of Nautilus, which didn’t move. They couldn’t have meet if the doctor and his servant were far away. However, the harpooner also hadn’t on his mind a variant with boats on the vessel and didn’t raise a curiosity to the metal thing during that time.

That machine destroyed their ship, but Aronnax says the following: “We know for a fact that it can travel very fast. Now it needs an engine to produce this velocity, and an engineer to operate the engine, therefore I can conclude that we are saved.”

Chapter seven was the last. Further research made me to recognize that I saved myself from that Verne’s mass putting of encyclopedia issues, which weren’t much in moment of my reading. A common mistake that heroes travel and visit regions about that must be told. I would get and more confusion seeing that characters have a sympathy to Nemo though he killed many people, and Aronnax changes when he kills a ship of “unknown origin”, as it turned due to publisher meddling though professor had a same introduction with submarine’s captain. I read, and as it was before, there was an absence of feeling for characters when Nautilus was going to submerge or in any other situation, as well as nothing have characters. Hetzel’s editing made much worst with a nameless central personage, his origin and giving an aimless goal, which was in simple swimming, and doing one more ramming later. A portrait of Tadeusz Kosciuszko was a saved element saved from Nemo’s initial origins alongside with his appearance describing in that: “He was calm, since his skin, more pale than ruddy, indicated composure in the blood.” Before recognizing these facts, I always puzzled that presented as an Indian person in images and film adaptations was always a white man. Reading this book and finding saying by one sailor that people wouldn’t pronounce: “That Indian, doctor, is the inhabitant of an oppressed country. I am his compatriot, and shall remain so to my very last breath!” A masterful writer would imagine a fiction state. I can merely think if that conception had a talented person.