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Audiobooks Read by volunteers

Audiobook · read by volunteers

Around the World in Eighty Days

Jules Verne (1828–1905)

Read by TBOL3 · 37 chapters · 8 h 48

Chapters

Save the whole book (ZIP, about 254 MB)

About the book

A wager in a London club: Phileas Fogg, a calm and exact gentleman, bets his friends that he can travel around the globe in eighty days. He leaves that very evening with his newly hired French valet, Passepartout, and a bag of banknotes. Every hour is counted, every timetable matters, and the world, with its steamers, trains, elephants and sailing sledges, does not always cooperate.

Hot on their heels is a detective convinced that Fogg is a bank thief. Along the way there are storms, a daring rescue in India, and an encounter on the American plains that tests the schedule as much as the nerves. Fogg himself never loses his composure, which only makes the chaos around him more fun.

Thirty-seven short chapters, about nine hours: a brisk, funny journey for any listener.

Introduction

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a French novelist who, together with his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, created the series of “extraordinary voyages” that made him one of the most translated authors in the world. Around the World in Eighty Days, first serialised in French in 1872 and published as a book in 1873, belongs to the same series as Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and it is probably his best-loved comedy of adventure.

The book reflects its moment. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the completion of the first American transcontinental railway in the same year, and the growth of steamship lines had made a circuit of the globe in a few weeks a realistic idea. Verne was fascinated by timetables, maps and the machinery of travel, and he turned that enthusiasm into a story driven by the clock. The novel was also adapted for the stage and later for the cinema more than once.

This recording uses the English translation by George Makepeace Towle (1841-1893), made in the years soon after the original appeared. It has thirty-seven short chapters, which suit the episodic, forward-rushing structure well, and runs for around nine hours. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer.

Part of the pleasure is the contrast between the unflappable Fogg and his excitable servant, and part is the sheer variety of settings, from London to Suez, Bombay, Hong Kong, Yokohama and San Francisco. For listeners today it also offers a glimpse of how the nineteenth century imagined a connected world, and it remains a model of the adventure novel done with wit.

Public domain

Jules Verne died in 1905: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.

The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.

Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text

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