martes, mayo 05, 2009

Turn the page... Tuesday


Believe or not, my eye catched the title of the book in the library when I was looking for somethng else. This is the complete title: The delighted States, a Book of Novels, Romances, and Their Unkown Translators, containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Indexes. The author that came with this title is Adam Thirlwell. And the book hides other suprises too, if you put it upside down and give it a 360 degrees turn, it turns ito the translation of Madesmoille O, a story by vladimir Nabokov, translated by Thirlwell first to the English and then to French.
I'm not trying to scare you, the book is one of hte freshest I have ever seen, it reads like fiction, and as I always say, life is far more interesting than ficition itself. I love the introductory scene, for example, the description of a suitcase, and all the places it has travelled to. Or the story of the first and lost translation of Madam Bovary to the English, made by Flaubert himself and his French tutor, a woman that caused him some problems in stairs and dinners...
This is a novel inside of a novel, and the authors, are sometimes the characters too. Some of the people that inhabits his little atlas are Jorge Luis Borges, Flaubert, Sterne, Tolstoy, James Joyce, Jane Austen, William Hogarth, MIguel de Cervantes, Vladimir Nabokov, Madame Bovary, Alexander the Emperor, Alice in Worderland, Berlin, Kafka and other men and women, main characters, cities, cafes,
This is the story ot the untold stories, of the misteries unveiled, of the relationships and serendipities that formed what we know now as the literary world. The equivalent will be seeing the characters of a circus before they get out of the curtains, but not only that, knowing their parents, their trips, the things that moved them...
The books has a collection of photographs, and some of them, I have never seen before (as Nabokov sunbathing, for example)
This is a little delightful book, or as the author calls it "a description of a milky way, an aurora borealis"

4 comentarios:

Adrienne dijo...

OH what a cool book. I'm going to see if my library has it! Thanks for sharing ;-)

Paula dijo...

Sounds really interesting and fun! Great review! You'll have us all reading this one~

Carol dijo...

Thanks girls!!!! :)
It was a cool surprise book for me too!

Unknown dijo...

This book sounds very interesting!