Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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The Adventures of a Special Correspondent by Jules Verne
This anonymous translation of Claudius Bombarnac, entitled The Aventures of a Special Correspondent may not, I suspect, be the most faithful rendering of Verne’s original text. The eponymous narrator travels from Tbilisi to “Pekin” via the Trans Caspian Railway and assorted other rail and boat connections in search of a story to send back to his newspaper in Paris, and as far as the basic story is concerned, the novel is entertaining and enjoyable. Unfortunately, it also features some rather dated racial humour, of which the following is a pretty typical example:
The Chinese was a man about fifty, with a bald head, a thick moustache, a long pigtail, and spectacles on his nose. Wrapped in a flowery robe, fat as if he belonged to the most distinguished people in the country, he had not a prepossessing face. After all, it was only a verification of our papers, and as ours were in order it did not much matter how repulsive he looked.
Verne seems to be curiously variable in his treatment of other nationalities, veering from admiration and praise for Englishmen and Americans in works like Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island, to outright loathing in books like this one, in which he collects a gaggle of two-dimensional stereotypes and lays into them gleefully. Only the French and, oddly, Romanians come out of this story looking good, and the various Asian peoples encountered appear almost entirely without any redeeming characteristics at all. It is distasteful stuff, perhaps exacerbated by mistranslation, but, if based in any way on the original text, indicative of one of Verne’s less admirable traits.
On the other hand, unlike all the other Verne I’ve read recently, this novel actually has female characters in it, although they are not exactly complex creations. One of them is an English businesswoman who is journeying to China to buy up a load of human hair to make wigs from, and who serves mostly as one of the targets for nationality-based humour. The other significant female is a mysterious Romanian living in Peking to whom a large packing case in the luggage van is addressed, and who turns out to be rather significant, but does not play a large part in the story herself. Still, it is nice to see the other fifty per-cent represented at all by Verne for a change. The last four or five of his works I have read have been Y-chromosome-only zones.
Bonus link: an interesting looking Jules Verne site I found during my researches on this particular novel.