User Reviews

in this novel, or so I understood. It's about the holographic projector, because Stilla is seen as a ghost 3D image moving in the air, with shape and volume visible from all the angles. He was good friends with most of the scientists of the time and had deep insights into science, but his genius relies in what he imagined the technology will go to in the future. At the end of the 19-th century the moving pictures were latest technology, and sound was about to be added, but holography was something to be researched theoretically, being discovered in 1947. He imagined that if moving pictures were something easy to understand and reproduce, the future will make available the three dimensional pictures.

I am impressed that a film of this lesser Verne novel from 1892 was finally made - I have never seen it (it is a Roumanian production, which is understandable, but not likely to pop up in the U.S. very easily). However, I was lucky years ago to purchase one of the few paperback English editions of the novel (the title is CARPATHIAN CASTLE or THE CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS) put out by Ace paperbacks in the late 1960s in a doomed attempt to put out in paperback the "Fitzroy edition" of Verne edited by I.O.E.Evans. Only ten volumes were ever printed. When I find a copy of one of his lesser known titles I consider myself lucky.

Verne, according to his grandson (Jean - Jules Verne), had a quiet love affair with a lady in Amiens, that his wife Honorine never knew of. She died in 1885. The novel itself was completed by 1889 (Verne was frequently ahead of himself with written manuscripts, but he would hold them back while older manuscripts got published by Hetzel, his publisher). The sad nature of the plot may have to do with Verne thinking of his dead girlfriend.

Verne loved music, and opera is at the center of the plot here. An aristocrat, Count Fritz de Telek, falls in love with a great opera diva, La Stilla. Unfortunately, among the other suitors, is another aristocrat named Baron Gortz, who goes to everyone of La Stilla's performances, and is unnerving her by his intense devotion as a fan. La Stilla finally has a heart attack while performing when she notes Gortz is staring at her again, and she dies as a result. Fritz is heart broken and worse he gets a nasty note from Gortz telling him that he (Fritz) is responsible for the opera singer's demise.

Both aristocrats are from the Carpathian area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Fritz is recovering at home, when the locals discover that a ruined castle in the area - long deserted - has apparently gotten a mysterious tenant - a ghostly looking woman who is singing all the time. Fritz hears descriptions, and they sound like La Stilla. He and the others have a meeting about this phenomenon at the local tavern, and suddenly a disembodied voice warns them not to come to the castle.

Fritz and his servant go to investigate the castle - and eventually they do have a series of adventures where they see the "ghost" and it is that of La Stilla - but she is so realistic. She is constantly singing the last aria that she sang on stage - she is in her very costume. But is she a ghost - the hills of the Carpathians are eerie and full of odd happenings.

Eventually Fritz finds that Gortz is behind the phenomenon. It seems the Baron has an associate, an eccentric inventor named Orfanek. He had rigged up the opera house with the 1890 style recording equipment, and had given Gortz a recording of La Stilla's great aria. But he also had worked out a curious device that would aim at a portrait of La Stilla in her costume for the role, and (with a manipulation of mirrors make her painted figure look like it was moving while she sang.

With it's "Dracula" locale (written a decade before Bram Stoker's novel was published) CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS is a real curiosity. But it is amazing that just at the moment that Friese - Greene, Edison, and half a dozen others were about to make the correct move to transforming still photographs into film, Verne chose such a different approach to "motion pictures". Maybe he had read of the difficulties of synchronizing frames of film in a projector (not really solved - apparently - until Edison and his lab technicians and George Eastman got together). He had to know something about the possibilities of motion pictures - he was well in step with recording advances (the voice recording of La Stilla is not on a cylinder in a Victrola). The result is quaint - a look at what was just around the corner, but somehow going in the wrong direction with the actual work.

But the novel's subject matter, of the hero finding love, losing it, finding it again, and losing it again is really different for Verne. So is another minor point in his favor. In the novel, Verne actually breaks away from his stereotypical thinking about Jews slightly. In HECTOR SERVADAC (1876) Verne had a typical Jewish moneylender as a thorn in the side of the characters who are stuck on a comet that hit part of the earth. Here, in CASTLE IN THE CARPATHIANS, he has the tavern keeper Jonas, who is Jewish, and is quite a good natured, even brave figure. However, Verne spoils this effect when he includes a Jewish peddler at the start of the novel, who sells cheap goods to people knowing they won't last long. And one of the comments about Jonas is that it's too bad other Jews aren't like him. As I said he broke away from his stereotypical thinking slightly.