Having assured the members of London's exclusive Reform Club that he will circumnavigate the world in 80 days, Fogg—stiff, repressed, English—starts by joining forces with an irrepressible Frenchman, Passepartout, and then with a ravishing Indian beauty, Aouda. Together they slice through jungles, over snowbound passes, even across an entire isthmus—only to get back five minutes late. Fogg faces despair and suicide, but Aouda makes a new man of him, able to face even the Reform Club again.
Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) contains a strong dose of post-Romantic reality plus extensive borrowing from the author's own Journey to England and Scotland—but not a shred of science fiction. Its modernism lies instead in the experimental literary technique, with parallel plots, a narrator constantly made to look foolish, four characters in search of their own unconscious, and a unique twisting of space and time.
Verne's classic, a bestseller for over a century, has never appeared in a critical edition before. William Butcher's stylish new translation moves as fast and as brilliantly as Fogg's own journey.
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