Delighted States : A Book of Novels, Romances, and Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Indexes

by Thirlwell

• ISBN13: 9780374137229
• ISBN10: 0374137226
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-27
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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 Edouard 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 forUlysses, 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 Statesattempts 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.

Author Biography

Adam Thirlwell was born in 1978. His first novel, Politics, was translated into thirty languages. In 2003, he appeared on Granta’s list of the best British novelists under forty. His second novel, The Misprint, will be published next year. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Index of Main Characters and Their Main Locations
Volume I	p. 1
Mikey	p. 3
Jeanne de Lamare	p. 35
Pierre Menard	p. 65
L Boom	p. 91
The Fluke	p. 117
Volume Ii	p. 133
Monsieur Sterne	p. 135
The Fluke	p. 165
[actual squiggle not reproducible]	p. 189
Hrabalovstina	p. 203
Volume Iii	p. 229
Nicola Tolstoy	p. 231
Weyl & Scampi	p. 257
Mama	p. 283
Volume Iv	p. 311
K	p. 313
Ferdydurke	p. 343
Volume V	p. 367
The Fluke	p. 369
Sirin	p. 399
Notes	p. 433
Acknowledgements	p. 467
Index of Themes and Motifs	p. 471
Index of Real Life	p. 502
A Short Chronological Index of Some of the Books in This Book	p. 504
Index of Squiggles	p. 506
Mademoiselle O
'Mademoiselle O' in English	p. 1
'Mademoiselle O' in French	p. 27
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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