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Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, a young French novelist named Gustave Flaubert at last abandons sentimentality and begins to write. He influences the obscure French writer Édouard Dujardin, who is read by James Joyce on the train to Trieste, where he will teach English to the Italian novelist Italo Svevo. Back in Paris, Joyce asks Svevo to deliver a suitcase containing notes for Ulysses, a novel that will be viscerated by the expat Gertrude Stein, whose first published story is based on one by Flaubert. This carousel of influence shows how translation and emigration lead to a new and true history of the novel. We devour novels in translation while believing that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. The Delighted States attempts to solve this conundrum while mapping an imaginary country, a country of readers: the Delighted States. This book is a provocation, a box of tricks, a bedside travel book; it is also a work of startling intelligence and originality from one of our finest young writers.
- Sales Rank: #2243865 in Books
- Brand: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- Published on: 2008-05-27
- Released on: 2008-05-27
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.79" h x 1.37" w x 6.67" l, 1.81 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 592 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his labyrinthine and surprisingly engrossing epic of literary influence and translation, Thirlwell (Politics) provides an idiosyncratic perspective on a wide range of authors and books, from Don Quixote to Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal. A leading young British novelist, Thirlwell creates narrative enthusiasm and vividly drawn characters in a welcome departure from the academic approach to this kind of project. His technique is generally conversational rather than thesis driven, and his dips into notoriously tricky works like Ulysses and Tristram Shandy are characterized by impressively observed but plainly written close readings in the vein of the popular literary scholar Harold Bloom. One of Thirlwell's basic conceits is that style is inherently translatable, "even if its translation is not perfect," and he argues this earnestly and convincingly across eras and borders. Some of Thirlwell's arguments will undoubtedly cause debate among critics and readers, such as his defense of Constance Garnett, the original English translator of War and Peace, whose work has been criticized and possibly superseded by recent high-profile translators. However, Thirwell writes more as a reader than as an academic, and his passionate explications of writers from Flaubert to Nabokov is an absolute pleasure. Photos. (Apr. 22)
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From The New Yorker
Ostensibly devoted to the problem of literary translation, this provocative treatise rambles through the Western canon from Cervantes to Bellow, treating novelists less as subjects than as characters in a sprawling intercontinental epic. Thirlwell revels in the anecdotal (Italo Svevo studied English with James Joyce) and the serendipitous (the French word dada was invented as an equivalent for "hobby-horse," in " Tristram Shandy"); presents indexes whose entries include "hamburgers" and "squiggles"; and lauds digression as the best means of capturing the "serious nothings" of life. While acknowledging the difficulty of conveying the "perpetual giggle" of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin’s name in any language other than Gogol’s Russian, Thirlwell insists that translation is possible and, to that end, offers his own version of Nabokov’s "Mademoiselle O," evoking the story’s trilingual origins in fittingly verdant prose.
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Review
Praise for Politics: "One of the funniest, most stylish, and utterly original debuts to hit the stands in recent years . . . There is nothing quite like [it] in contemporary English writing." --The Times (London)
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Conversationally Oracular
By Hamilton Beck
Thirlwell's book seems at first to place a high bar for any reviewer, as it implies familiarity with a wide variety of foreign languages and literary traditions. Soon enough, though, one realizes that this standard is so exacting it can scarcely be met – least of all by the author himself. Besides English (his mother tongue), Thirlwell knows French and some Russian. He nonetheless deals fearlessly with stylistic aspects of novels written in a variety of other tongues, including Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and Czech, none of which he speaks.
Moreover, though he deals with an impressive array of primary sources, he includes few secondary ones. Many people, for instance, have examined Nabokov's views on translation. Thirlwell finds none of them worthy of note. One of his few extended discussions of actual translators deals with Constance Garnett and her "swarming precision." He also makes a daring suggestion when it comes translating the names of fictional characters: "in Gogol's story 'Coat,' it's not so much important that the main character's name is Akaky: it's more important that his name sounds like a minor part of speech. Mikey, therefore, will also do." And near the end he joins Nabokov in rejecting "the cliché of the smooth translation" (pg. 388). But that's about it.
He does attach his own version of Nabokov's "Mademoiselle O," a story that has already been translated repeatedly, first by Hilda Ward, then by Nabokov himself – twice (once from the original French, later from the Russian). Perhaps someday a graduate student in search of a thesis will take the trouble of comparing all these efforts, and then we can see how Thirlwell's stacks up. He himself never spells out why he thinks a new one is needed. He reveals little about the choices he presumably faced, the compromises he had to make, or even whether he found it difficult or not.
Really, though, it is style, not translation, that is Thirlwell's main subject. When he concentrates on this, readers may well find themselves seduced by the expansive sweep of his argument, as he flits from century to century, from Bellow to Borges, from Prague to Rio, alighting only as long as it takes to offer a provocative insight. He provides a checklist of Flaubert's techniques, including style indirect libre, the device by which seemingly objective third-person narration is colored by a character's subjective, first-person point of view. He examines Kafka's subtle humor and his technique of taking metaphors literally, with side glances at Gertrude Stein and Stendhal, with César Franck thrown in for good measure. Along the way, he offers up a variety of pictures and drawings, squiggles and maps, so that the volume at times recalls a scrapbook. Even Saul Steinberg makes an appearance.
His chapter on Sterne and Diderot rehearses in a witty, playful, and decidedly un-academic way some familiar arguments about these digressive authors. He claims, however, that theirs is a truncated tradition, that they allegedly had no 18th-century followers. This is not quite accurate. Thirlwell should at least have mentioned the neglected (and alas untranslated) German author Hippel, whose novel "Die Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie" represents a continuation of this line, with its memorable opening words, "I – Stop! Who goes there?" (see my book, "The Elusive "I" in the Novel: Hippel, Sterne, Diderot, Kant").
Considering that style is his subject, it seems legitimate to examine Thirlwell's own style. Is it entertaining, provocative, and stimulating? Yes, most definitely. Is his argument thorough, well-organized, and soundly reasoned? Hardly. Anyone expecting a sustained approach, built up brick by brick, is in for a disappointment. He writes about style the way he writes about translation – as though practically no one else has ever studied the matter before. Not even "le style c'est l'homme même" gets a passing nod. Reading Thirlwell is akin to listening to the book-length chat of a café intellectual who has the gift of making simplicity look smart. He flatters his readers by treating them as being clever enough to follow his butterfly-like flight plan. His meandering course is disguised, to some extent, by an elaborate division into five volumes, sixteen books, and innumerable chapters, all of whose headings, for some unfathomable reason, are printed in extremely faint typeface. I counted five indices, but may have missed some.
He also seems determined to prove the truth of his bold claim: "Inelegant prose style may still be part of a good prose style." At its best, his own prose can be quirky, provocative, whimsical, and aphoristic (to choose some of his favorite adjectives). At its worst, it is made up of flat pronouncements that rely heavily on that most humdrum of verbs, "to be." All the heavy lifting is done by the nouns and adjectives, which rest on the plainest foundation imaginable: variations of "it is." Here's a sample from a single paragraph early in the book: "Joyce is… His style is… One consequence of this is… It is possible… Because style is… It is more amorphous… It exists… It is biological" (pg. 22). You can’t get much more basic than that. For readers and writers who were taught to use strong, active verbs, this can be annoying.
A good bit of this flatness can pass unnoticed, though, because of his technique of tacking on the startling apercu. Take, for example, his final assertion – that style is biological. He proceeds to spin this out, listing various body organs and parts by way of example, not omitting the left and right ventricles. His technique is to indulge in the banal, lulling the reader in commonplaces, then suddenly veering off in some unexpected direction: "A style, in the end, is a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless" (pg. 20). You could call this the flash-bang effect. The problem is that if you let yourself get caught up in the flow, some rather dubious assertions can slip by. As when he asserts, for example, that style "exists prior to language." Does it really? Are we still talking about prose?
His overuse of "to be" lends itself to a hybrid tone, which might be termed the conversational oracular. After a few hundred pages of reading pronouncements like "a style is aesthetic only" and "everyone is sentimental," one gets the impression that Thirlwell could alter any given argument into its opposite, and it would fit in just as well. He could assert that "each description is irreplaceable" or that "no description is irreplaceable" with equal conviction, and even the reader who is trying to pay close attention would scarcely notice the difference. He asserts, for example, that because real life "is the opposite of utopia, it is also utopian," (pg. 321). You have to wade through streams of such banality to find the nuggets of insight. But they can be found: "The first great Russian novel [Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin"] was a rewrite of a French travesty of an English avant-garde novel ["Tristram Shandy"]" (pg. 375). "For Nabokov, pattern conferred permanence on art: just as it was the perception of pattern in real life which hinted at an invisible, mystical stage manager" (pg. 412).
To conclude, I offer a summary of our author as he himself might have written it: As a stylist, our author is not particularly distinguished, at least when it comes to composing sentences. At this level nothing would be easier than to mock him for indulging in a stream-of-self-consciousness. Though the line between mockery and homage is often exceeding fine. Just ask Bohumil Hrabal in Prague, who knew a thing or two about style. And this word is important. Because the truest style is also the most elliptical, a style which is almost not a style at all. Whereas the opposite is so often also true. But not always. Which leads to the question: what, after all, is so funny about digression? It is funny because it is the inversion of seriousness. Thus restoring the idea of passion to its adolescent grandeur. But passion is not permanent – an ironic collage cannot last. The great authors play ping-pong with each other across the centuries. Just like it is possible to translate a story whose language you do not speak, presuming you can find a version of it in French. But I digress.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A day in the life of a reader
By GDP
Most mornings I begin my day with bran flakes topped by slices of banana, as well as the crossword puzzle. On Mondays and Tuesdays the puzzle is done before the cereal, on Fridays and Saturdays it isn't until a cup of coffee or two that the puzzle is complete. Like the other day, a Saturday, when a seven letter word for 'concoct' stumped me. Putting the puzzle aside I thought about the book I had read the day before, 'The Delighted States' by Adam Thirlwell.
The book is sub-titled, 'A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes'. That alone should tell you something important about Thirlwell's style.
The theme of the book is that in spite of the difficulty in faithfully translating novels into a foreign language, the style of a novel can still transcend traditional language barriers and that innovative styles are readily adapted by authors around the world. Examples of novels proving his point abound, using Cervantes, Sterne, Stendhal, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka et al as authors whose style echoes in the work of others from different countries. 'Point' may not be the appropriate word, since Thirlwell argues the theme in an indirect, multi-layered manner. 'Argue' works, however, as Thirlwell uses a form of the word himself, as in this short excerpt, "I have been arguing that style is the most important thing, and survives its mutilating translations ..."
Here is another quote from the book: "... [per Hrabal] literary history is like a giant game of ping-pong, where the talented players 'hit smashes over the nets as formed by the borders of States and nations'. And ping-pong is fine with me too. ... A cafe where everyone's playing ping-pong: that's my new definition of literary history. Zany, yes, and competitive, but with espresso." Come to think of it, I could use a cup of coffee myself about now.
Wait, not one word, but two words for 'concoct': D-R-E-A-M U-P. Caffeine is indeed the miracle drug! But I had better finish my thoughts about 'The Delighted States' before really returning to the puzzle.
This book came to my attention when reading Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter. In it he wrote, "A recent book that does concentrate on style in the novel is Adam Thirlwell's 'The Delighted States'. Thirlwell, a young British novelist who has read widely and enthusiastically in several languages, lays out a playful tour of the history of the novel that has considerable charm and poses some important questions about style in the novel, even if it is not altogether conceptually satisfying in the answers it provides." That's a concise and fair summary.
P-L-A-Y-F-U-L ... that would be a good crossword answer (possible clues: 'frolicsome' or 'whimsical').
While reading the book provides a fair amount of amusement and the author produces some interesting commentary, it's pretty idiosyncratic ... some may not like it's rambling, digressive style. I rated it three stars, but consider that bran flakes with banana slices is one of my favorite meals (along with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Well, peanut butter and apricot preserves, actually. Creamy peanut butter, not crunchy). A more imaginative person might assign four or even five stars.
Now, back to the crossword puzzle. What's a seven letter word for 'sincerely zealous'?
Addendum: Flip the book over (follow the instructions on your mattress) and it also features a "story" by Nabokov ("Mademoiselle O") translated by Thirlwell.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Delighted States is delightful!
By Anna Sears
An international romance with novelists as characters, Thirlwell's unpretentious & playful style raises this book high above more formal LitCrit. Ideal for translators, writers, and especially readers looking for readers seeking the delights of truly extraordinary novels.
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