Author Look-Alikes Vol. 8

Though they don’t share the same hairline, there’s something in the eyes and mouth that makes young Erich Maria Remarque look an awful lot like John Malkovich:

High foreheard, low eyebrows, and piercing eyes- Jules Verne was his generation's Russel Crowe - plus a couple months of beard growth:

He's portly, he's got a sly expression and lots of thick hair- you can almost picture Alexandre Dumas walking into his local basement-level watering hole to a merry chorus of “Norm!”:

James Fenimore Cooper kind of reminds me of the backstabbing friend from Ghost (Tony Goldwyn):

And E.M. Forster? The first person who comes to mind when I look at that dude is Macy’s smarmy in-house psychologist from “Miracle on 34th Street” (Porter Hall):

Kind of makes you want to rap him on the head with your cane, doesn't it?

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Fogg's Non-existent Airship

It has occurred to me that I’m missing out on one of the major perks of having a forum for my own personal ramblings: the opportunity to complain about stuff that bugs me.

So here is the first of what will be a sporadic feature- after all, not a lot of stuff really bugs me- that we’ll call “What Bugs Me Wednesday.”

We begin the series with one of literature’s greatest and longest-lasting lies: the mythical airship in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days.  Just about every film adaptation, comic book version and dumbed-down retelling has invented some sort of hot-air balloon out of whole cloth (pardon the pun). Even the cover art for reprintings of Verne’s classic is guilty from time to time. Sometimes it’s a zeppelin, sometimes it’s a steampunk airship, but whatever form it takes, it has no relation whatsoever to the story as Verne wrote it.

The incomparable Phileas Fogg and his valet Passpartout do indeed set out on a memorable adventure. They have run-ins with the law, with outlaws, with vigilantes and religious sects. There’s a princess in distress, an opium-den trap and an acrobatic circus. Modes of transportation are rented, bought, hijacked and destroyed, but at no point in the journey do the characters take to the air.

Do they take a turn on the back of an elephant? Sure. Do they cross the Great Plains in a fortuitous windsled? They do. But do they ever set foot in the basket of a hot-air balloon? No, no, a thousand times no. And it’s time for this nonsense to stop.

Pictured above are the thumbnails from the first page of Google Image results for “Around the World in 80 Days.” Take a quick look and you can see how widespread this pernicious falsehood has become. An entire generation is being led to believe that Fogg was some sort of Victorian Steve Fossett. And yeah, it kind of bugs me.

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

On Plot Twists

In the minds of some people, literary fiction is often synonymous with plotless, boring, navel-gazing fiction. We don't pretend to speak for everything published under the lit-fic rubric, but we obviously don’t share that view about the time-honored classics, and we’re happy to stand-up and myth-bust it for you whenever we get a chance.

Yesterday there was a post at BookRiot listing generic plot twists that have kind of run their course and become eyeroll-inducing clichés. I definitely agree with their list, but it also got me thinking about some classic plot twists that have been done really well- those that have caught me off guard, anyway. Here are three that I can think of right off the top of my head. (Major spoiler warning!) Add your own in the comments.

Mistaken identity in The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Tom drives Gatsby’s car as their little group heads into town and he stops to fill the tank at Wilson’s station. From the window, Tom’s illicit lover Myrtle makes the tragic association that will kill her later in the day. The group then makes the return trip back to West Egg, only this time an upset Daisy is driving Gatsby’s Rolls Royce and when Myrtle runs out to greet Tom, she is inadvertently struck and killed by the yellow car, which flees the scene.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wilson learns the runaway car belongs to Gatsby and goes looking for revenge while Tom and Daisy run off scot-free. This allows Fitzgerald to make a powerful statement about the reckless decadence of the roaring twenties, and the book becomes a classic for that reason.

Poetic coincidence in Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton:

Anglican pastor Stephen Kumalo tries in vain to work with tribal leaders to rejuvenate and save his barren village of Ixopo. But upon receiving a request for his own help, he uses all his savings to go to Johannesburg and aid his sister. While there he sets out to find Absalom, his long lost son. But just as he gets close to locating Absalom, he learns that he has been arrested for murder.

The man he killed is a white, racial justice activist whose estranged father just happens to be Mr. Jarvis, an aloof, but wealthy landowner living in the verdant hills above Ixopo. It is because of this tragic event that Jarvis posthumously comes to know his own long lost son through his political writings. He resolves to do what little he can to bring his son’s vision of racial justice to fruition. Despite losing his own child at the hands of a former Ixopo villager, he becomes the benefactor that the village always needed. Beautiful. Poetic. Read it.

Missing the forest for the trees in Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne:

In order to win a £15,000 bet, Phileas Fogg and his hapless French valet set off on an adventure-filled journey around the world. Fogg’s stoic calm and Passpartout’s skills as an erstwhile acrobat pull them out of one tragic set-back after another on their unbelievable journey. Still, as they near England on the 80th day, it becomes clear that they will not arrive back at the Reform Club in time to win the bet, and Fogg has resigned himself to failure and bankruptcy.

It is then that Passpartout learns that they had not taken the International Date Line into account, and that Fogg still has a few minutes to race to the Reform Club and win the bet. Verne definitely jumped the shark at a couple points in this novel, but I have to say I didn’t see that final twist coming.


Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 are two others that deliver interesting twists, but since those two books are soon to square off as our first Literary Deathmatch contestants, we’ll leave them for another day. What other works of literary fiction have delivered amazing twists?