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Jules Verne. Paris au XX siecle. Paris. Hachette. 1994. 217 pages. 119 F. ISBN 2012351182.
The posthumous publication of Paris au XX siecle has further promoted the rehabilitation of the reputation of Jules Verne. Up until the post-World War II period, he was often looked down upon by he official literary establishment as "a writer of children's books." (The fact that these sold hundreds of thousands of copies in French and in translation--224 translations in twenty-five different countries--may have contributed to the resentful disdain of his peers!). By the 1960s, however, this was changing, when Marcel More hailed Verne as "un revolutionnaire souterrain," a pioneer of science fiction, an ancestor of Orwell and Bradbury, and an astonishingly clairvoyant prophet of "the shape of things to come." His Paris, with its electric railways, its "gaz-cabs" which jam streets brilliantly lighted with electricity, the air polluted by industrial waste, the recorded music blaring from loudspeakers, a city dominated by "machines and money," strikes us as all too familiar.
In 1966 Le Livre de Poche launched a large-scale Verne revival, publishing 100,000 copies each of his ten best-known novels. Verne had won a place among the significant authors of his time and spoke prophetically of our own, even though his publisher, Hetzel, had refused Paris in 1863, scolding that it was "du plus petit journalisme." The manuscript seems to have been lost after 1911, until Jean Verne discovered it by chance in 1989 while going through some of his great-grandfather's papers. After verification, it was quickly snatched up by Hachette and became a best seller.
The "minimalist" narrative (Verne was clearly more interested in speculation about the future than in the creation of fictional characters) serves merely as a framework for lengthy descriptions, often...