Boy, do I strongly disagree with that guy from The Stranger.

 

I read the book first and liked it pretty well, mainly because I came to see it not as a thoroughgoing critical text that seeks to test, try and prove a theory as much as I did one man's adventures hacking through the wilds of world literature. It was all very personal, loose, conversational and self-deprecating at times, as Thirlwell keeps stubbing his toe on books that disprove his point (which is basically that style isn't strictly linguistic and nothing defies translation) but he still tenaciously sticks to his guns. anything rather enjoyably digressive in what Thirlwell might call the Sterneian tradition: he rambles around with a certain amount of purpose. There's intent and design to the book.

 

I don't know if I fully understand why he included the translation of "Mademoiselle O," however. The book is very much an homage to Nabokov, as the book was inspired by a couple of stray comments by VN: 1) that the purpose of his own novels was to prove that the novel did not exist, and 2) that it would a great adventure to trace the history of an idea through the ages. In Thirlwell's own case, so far as I can make sense of it, it's to trace the way a series of novels from around the globe have either influenced or inspired each other, even when they were imperfectly translated. (Typical case: Pushkin reads a supposedly poor translation of Tristram Shandy and writes Eugene Onegin; "The first great Russian novel was a rewrite of a French travesty of an English avant-garde novel.")

 

The book begins with a Nabokov (in an epigraph) and it ends with him, too, with an account of his translation of Pushkin. Then you turn the book upside down and you get to reasd Thirlwell's translation of "Mademoiselle O," which strikes me basically as just a showy flourish.

 

I don't know French, so I can't make a real comparison with the original version of "Mademoiselle O" -- but, I did re-read the Nabokov's story in English in Collected Stories, then the relevant chapter in Speak, Memory. For what it's worth, Thirlwell's translation was definitely a very weak, dim echo of these. All I could think was "Well, he's no Nabokov, but then who is?" The idea that Thirlwell added anything to the experience -- let alone "understood the story better than its author" -- is just absurd.
 

Rodney Welch

Columbia, SC