The Delighted States: 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

Adam Thirlwell

Picador, Mar 30, 2010 - Literary Criticism - 592 pages

Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, Gustave Flaubert begins his first novel, Madame Bovary, which influences the minor French novelist Édouard Dujardin, whose novel is read by James Joyce, whose own novel Ulysses will move the Italian novelist Italo Sveno, and later Gertrude Stein, in radical ways. This carousel of influence shows how we devour novels in translation, while often 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. As a companion, this book comes with a new translation into English of Vladimir Nabokov's "Mademoiselle O."

About the author

ADAM THIRLWELL's first novel, Politics, was translated into thirty languages. In 2003, he appeared on Granta's list of the Best British Novelists under forty.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Delighted States: 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
• Author: Adam Thirlwell
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Picador, 2010
• ISBN: 0312428294, 9780312428297
• Length: 592 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Translating & Interpreting; Literary Criticism / Books & Reading