Vim and Verve, and Sometimes Verne ed. by Gary Westfahl (review)

Reviewed by: Vim and Verve, and Sometimes Verneed. by Gary Westfahl Alex Kirstukas and Royal Holloway Vim and Verve, and Sometimes Verne. Gary Westfahl, ed. Jules Verne Lives!: Essays on His Works and Legacy. McFarland, 2023. ix+ 313 pp. 49. 95 pbk. Right from its exclamatory title and the first words of its Introduction—"Jules Verne may be the most important author of the nineteenth century" (1) —this edited collection proclaims itself an energetic, all-embracing celebration of Verne's works and influence. The boldness of this approach strikes a welcome note in Verne studies, still so often placed toward the margins of Anglophone academia; indeed, Jules Verne Lives!is only the second edited collection in English of Verne scholarship, after Edmund J. Smyth's Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (2000). (Special mention goes to the four English-language contributions in the 2015 festschrift Collectionner l'extraordinaire, sonder l'ailleurs: Essais sur Jules Verne en hommage à Jean-Michel Margot. ) Westfahl continues his Introduction in a similarly vigorous vein; after noting some long-held misunderstandings of Verne and recent efforts in rehabilitation, he promises "a sampling of cutting-edge scholarship" on Verne's works, the creative responses they have garnered, and the subgenre of steampunk sf with which Verne is often associated (3). This ambitious scope proves both a strength and a liability, often veering toward structural chaos but offering many rewarding moments along the way. The book's first section, "The Writings of Jules Verne, " suggests the bold approach pays off: Westfahl has collected largely sterling work in seven essays by Arthur B. Evans, Bed Paudyal, Marie-Hélène Huet (twice), John Rieder, Howard V. Hendrix, and Nicolas Saucy. Evans's "Humor in the Works of Jules Verne" makes a joyful starting point, reflecting the lighthearted tone of the title Jules Verne Lives!and contextualizing it in a thorough, well-balanced analysis of Verne's varied comic strategies. Among other highlights of the section, Paudyal's "Imperialism and the Sublime of the Enlightenment in Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires" investigates Verne's multifaceted treatment of the sublime and points up its colonialist undertones, while Huet's "Winter Lights: Disaster, Interpretation, and Jules Verne's Polar Novels" is a tour de force drawing apposite connections to polar history, meteorology, psychology, End Page 130and even Surrealist art. Considering that the book seems to select from a wide pool, including new pieces as well as existing papers from the 2009 J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, this section has some unexpected imbalances in its curation— The Mysterious Island (1875), though one of Verne's crowning achievements, begins to feel a little overrepresented—but the essays certainly support the book's title in suggesting Verne's vibrant scholarly afterlife. The second section, "Responses to Verne's Works, " is more forced in concept, despite the quality work in its six essays by Ekaterina Yudina, Kieran O'Driscoll, Terry Harpold (twice), Westfahl, and Peter W. Sinnema. On the plus side, Harpold's "There Are No Chicken Dinosaurs on The Mysterious Island: Or, Why the Film Adaptations of Jules Verne's Novel Are Mostly Terrible" perfectly delivers on the section header's promise; the essay's insights illuminate not only the specific films it delightfully disses, but fundamental properties of the source novel—and indeed of Vernian storytelling writ large—that are often lost in adaptation. Most of the other topics in this section, however, strain against the catchall label "responses. " For example, although Yudina's "'Comrade Jules Verne vs. the Sharks of Imperialism' in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Crimson Island" neatly outlines the implications of deploying Verne as a satirical pretext and quasi-character, it also documents how The Crimson Island (1927) "responds" far more to Russian and Western conceptions of revolution and empire than to Verne's own writings, which are relegated essentially to set-dressing. Somewhat similarly, while Westfahl's "Have Verne—Will Travel: When the Three Stooges and Paladin Met Phileas Fogg" details two oddball 1960s versions of Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), it is hard to shake the suspicion that both versions are comments on Mike Todd's 1956 blockbuster film rather than. . .