The Delighted States

“However error-ridden and technically troubling a translation might be—the syntax clumsy, the vocabulary misleading, the dialogue wooden—translations have nonetheless managed, somehow, to convey their sources sufficiently for their originals survive, not to say thrive, far from home. That ‘somehow’—a compelling mystery—is explored in a fine new book by British writer Adam Thirlwell . . . What is most unusual about Thirlwell’s book—in addition to the quality of his bookshelf’s contents, for the writers he chooses to discuss are, as a group, as excellent as they are unfashionably canonical—is the lightness of his formal approach. Typically, treatises on translation, especially the better ones—given all the talk of ‘fidelity’ that the subject generates—have tended to the tendentious, while the worse ones—given the inherent wonkiness that the subject entails—tend to skew ponderous or pompous. Thirlwell manages to elude these expectations, while crafting a substantive and resolutely entertaining tour of the subject.”—Wyatt Mason, Sentences (Harper’s Magazine)

"A Thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form."—A.S. Byatt, Financial Times (UK)

 

“A scintillating figure-of-eight skate around, inter alia, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz and Nabokov, on the theme of style and translation, a one-off like a novel with everything cut but the digressions, and an interesting fact on every page.”—Tom Stoppard, The Guardian

“A welcome engagement of unjustly marginalized issues . . . Entertaining to read all the way through, and this is no small virtue in an age in which most works of criticism are about as much fun as a visit to the proctologist.”—Robert Alter, The New Republic

“Thirlwell romps through European literature: Joyce, Gogol, Flaubert, Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Hrabal, Kafka and others . . . The anecdotes he chooses are delightfully obscure. The photos and illustrations (squiggles and flourishes meant to show the irrational wanderings of the human mind) are playful and evocative . . . he has a good time, which is (ahem) always fun to watch.”—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

"At a time when literary criticism is getting the boot in print media, and factually challenged wags on countless book blogs seethe with score-settling enmity, 30-year-old Adam Thirlwell is a refreshing throwback to the thoughtful man of letters who hides is radical heard behind the worn lapels of a tweed jacket. Thirlwell's book The Delighted States is the most exciting literary criticism to be published here in some time. Structured like some promo experiment in Barthelme-esque narrative, or Laurence Sterne on a Benzedrine bender, British novelist Thirlwell (Politics, Miss Herbert) uses his taut epigrammatic style to delve into the superstructure of certain kinds of (mostly European) literature, gleaning how style, translation, brevity, even errors have created sublime works of art. Jumping between England, Spain, America, Poland and elsewhere, unearthing new traditions that connect Joyce to obscure 19th-century French novelists, Thirlwell has fashioned an intellectual thrill-ride packed with rhetorical fireworks."—Marc Weingarten, LA Weekly 

“The Delighted States is founded on the liberating observation that although translation is always imperfect, it frequently is good enough. Great authors have read each other in translations, and productively. As a corollary, suggests Mr. Thirlwell, who admits to only ‘fluent English, quixotic French, and hobbyhorsical Russian,’ he can confidently write about all of them, and in the course of his book he organizes a glowing constellation of great names. He makes his argument by way of anecdote, beginning with Flaubert, whose formative trip to Egypt illustrates the subtle thesis of The Delighted States, that healthy experience begets irony, that worldliness is the natural successor to romanticism. His book is not merely a celebration of translation, warts and all, then, but also of the warts-and-all worldview . . . The problems and opportunities of translation open onto related questions of style. Is style more than the sentence? Is it not the author's worldview itself? And can't that be translated? Sure, says the reader, and The Delighted States begins with an air of common sense and a gracious will to entertain . . . The author's gifts are as obvious as his ambition.”—Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun

“Much of the pleasure in Mr. Thirlwell’s book comes from the writers he quotes from and comments on—among them Laurence Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz and Nabokov, who declared that masterpieces are made of 'dazzling combinations of drab parts.' Combine that dazzling crew in your playground, and you’re unlikely to have a drab time.”—Adam Begley, The New York Observer

"Imagine instead a single, coherent critical study as breezy and casual as an open house, with other people wandering the rooms, speaking other languages, the broker a B-level translator (slightly) misinforming buyers about the rooms’ functions, so that everyone leaves with a different view of the dwelling’s configuration. But everybody wants the place. This describes both Adam Thirlwell’s The Delighted States and its central thesis, which is that (slight) mistranslations are the key to the novel’s evolving majesties . . . Armed with all this anti-structural structure, Thirlwell himself takes on the queasy, quantum exercise of a difficult, unexplored translation. When you turn the book over you see a different cover: Nabokov’s short story 'Mademoiselle O,' rendered into English by one Adam Thirlwell. (The translator sets no small task for himself, as 'O' later became the fifth chapter of Speak, Memory, one of the greatest memoirs, in any language, written in the last century) . . . And though Nabokov’s English version brings across indispensable richness, Thirlwell’s is more than adequate; it possesses its own vibrant, thriving life.”—Richard Wirick, Bookslut 

“[A] teemingly erudite and unfailingly delightful epic about the glories and accidents of translation and the novel as an art form dependent on internationalism . . . It’s high on this year’s list of literary delights.”—The Buffalo News

“A quirky history of the novel, a story of the textual travels of a particular mind, and I need to add that if novelists are characters here, their own fictional characters are just as important.”—Michael Wood, Bookforum

“A novel approach to the novel, a stylish consideration of style, literary criticism as creative nonfiction, and delectable brain candy . . . Thirlwell established himself as something of an engant terrible with his first novel, Politics, and this book should enhance his reputation.”—Library Journal

“In this 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 draws 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 stick 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 most 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 . . . Thirlwell writes more as a reader than as an academic, and his passionate explications of writers from Flaubert to Nabokov is an absolute pleasure.”—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)