The green ray
The green ray (also The green glow , The green flash ) is a novel by the French author Jules Verne . The novel was first published in 1882 by the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel under the French title Le Rayon-vert . The first German-language edition appeared in 1885 under the title The Green Ray .
action
The green ray is a pure romance novel. It tells the story of the young Helena Campbell , who is brought up by her two uncles Sib Melvill and Sam Melvill . When they are about to marry her, she explains that she will not marry until she has seen the green ray : the last spark of green light at sunset, which can only very rarely be seen on a clear day by the sea. According to an ancient legend, whoever saw the green light cannot be wrong about things of love.
So the uncles Sib and Sam set out with their niece and their chosen marriage candidate, the pragmatic , unromantic Aristoblus Ursiclos , to look for the green glow. But no matter how far you go, something always comes up, sometimes clouds are coming up, another time a sailing ship passes the sun at the last moment . The young Olivier Sinclair joins them on the journey . After all, the tour company in the Hebrides is lucky, but while the rest of the group admires the green beam, Helena only has eyes for Olivier.
Rating
The novel, which is set in Scotland , has absolutely no utopian elements. The secondary characters Sib Melvill and Sam Melvill as well as the scholar Aristoblus Ursiclos are typical eccentrics for Jules Verne . Otherwise the work is rather untypical for Jules Verne.
filming
The film The Green Shine by the French director Éric Rohmer from 1987 refers to the novel.
background
The physical background is the green lightning that actually sometimes occurs at sunrise or sunset on the high seas .
Bibliography (selection)
- Jules Verne: The green lightning (translation: Cornelia Hasting). Hamburg: Mare, 2013, ISBN 978-3-86648-180-0
- Jules Verne: The green lightning (translation: Cornelia Hasting). Cologne: DuMont, 2018, ISBN 978-3-83216-444-7
literature
- Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart and Munich 1992.
- Volker Dehs and Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
- Volker Dehs: Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6
Web links
- "The green ray" as an e-book in HTML on zeno.org (digital version of the translation Vienna, Pest, Leipzig 1887)
- The green ray in Andreas Fehrmann's Jules Verne Collection
- Illustrated revision (PDF file; 9.50 MB)