First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Adam Thirlwell, I was recently dismayed to discover, writes non-fiction much like his fiction. He is infuriating. And brilliant. Politics, his debut novel, was perhaps the most irritating book I have ever thoroughly enjoyed reading. Miss Herbert, his debut work of non-fiction (due out in October), has already drawn level with it, and I’m not even half way through.

My theory is that Thirwell is talented enough to write in pretty well any way he likes, but he has decided to test his readers with a voice calibrated one constant notch short of unbearable. If you have any chips on your shoulders at all, about writers or writing or being patronised, you won’t be able to read him. You must first make yourself pure. You must not expect concessions to be made to your dignity. He will say what he finds obvious as though it were obvious, and you can take it or leave it.

Miss Herbert is, among other things, an elaborate series of meditations on translation and style, and an elaborate re-writing of what you might think a novel and a style are. It’s a furiously stimulating read, and I find myself in almost constant disagreement with it. Here’s one passage that had me scribbling particularly hard in the margins—

And this is why translation is always still possible. The style of a novel, and a novelist, is a set of instructions, a project: it is never able to create an entirely unique, irreplaceable object… All styles are systems of operations on a language for the contrivance of effects: they are like machines. And these stylish machines are therefore portable. Machines, after all—like cars, or typewriters—can be imported anywhere.

I don’t understand how a novel can be said to have a style in this sense. Novelists exist, novels exist and readers exist. We can be fairly sure of this. The novels that novelists create are physical objects: marks in a sequence. These marks convey things to anyone who looks at them, although not necessarily very much and probably, after sufficient time, almost nothing. Broadly, then, there are two ways in which reading is facilitated. (1) A reader moves themselves towards the text by gaining experience that overlaps with its author’s—knowledge of words and language, of history, of intertext (2) An “expert” reader moves the text itself towards another reader, by glossing or altering its language, and/or by explaining its context and intertexts.

All editing and explanation and translation is the second kind of act. Editors process texts, just as translators do. In each case, you create a new object that is intended to be more, or differently, meaningful to certain people than the original—or you try to strip a text of bogus insertions and assumptions. Perhaps the original was in French or Chinese; perhaps it was deemed to be overly technical, or obscure, or badly written. Each version has a style, and each style is different. So it seems odd to me to claim that the novel is never “an entirely unique” object. Surely it’s the uniqueness of every literary object that demands translation in the first place?

[I've now reviewed the book in full for Prospect. Lucky subscribers can read more here.]