Lemony Snicket

Dear Reader,

If you have not read anything about the Baudelaire orphans, then before you read even one more sentence, you should know this: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are kindhearted and quick-witted, but their lives, I am sorry to say, are filled with bad luck and misery. All of the stories about these three children are unhappy and wretched, and this one may be the worst of them all. If you haven't got the stomach for a story that includes a hurricane, a signalling device, hungry leeches, show more cold cucumber soup, a horrible villain, and a doll named Pretty Penny, then this book will probably fill you with despair. I will continue to record these tragic tales, for that is what I do. You, however, should decide for yourself whether you can possibly endure this miserable story.

With all due respect,

Lemony Snicket show less

Just one more, okay? Just one more, then I'll stop.

Hospitals are hostile, it's true. Invariably when you are in a hospital you are being poked and prodded and tested and measured and sometimes they even knock you unconscious and cut you open or slice bits of you off and when you wake up you are in terrible pain and they don't let you eat for days. So a hospital seems like exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find the Baudelaires, sneaking around behind balloons with smiley faces, show more listening to Olaf's voices over the intercom, sorting through anagrams with alphabet soup and being obliged to cut Violet's head off with a rusty knife in front of an eager audience. Oh, come on, now, you know perfectly well you'd be disappointed if it were any other way. Monster. show less

All the wrong questions have been asked, and some of the right ones, and now come the answers, racing on a benighted train beset by enemies and plots, our beleaguered hero has one chance to thwart a plan he doesn't understand. But first there's murder most foul and villainy most base and even if he asks the right questions and gets the right answers and defeats the villain, what will he lose?

Brilliant conclusion to a terrifically entertaining series. Exciting and melancholic at the same show more time, very noir, our hero is a mix of Marlow and the Continental Op, walking down mean streets and mean railway carriageways, playing dangerous games and falling for a dangerous lady. Lovely. Please let there be more. show less

When I teach genre classes, I like to conclude with an "edge case" for the genre, one that pushes my students to make a claim as to whether or not the book fits the genre, which in doing so forces to them to articulate what the genre is. When I taught The Modern Novel, I ended with Daniel Handler's Adverbs, which you might define as a collection of linked short stories, yet the cover of my HarperPerennial edition, at least, claims the subtitle A NOVEL. Though the book is not unified in terms show more of plot, a number of characters recur (or seem to recur) between stories, and there are recurrent motifs, like pop songs and birds, that bring unity to the book, beyond the fact that the whole book is a meditation on one topic, that of love.

Handler does tie much of the book together in the chapter "Truly," which is more of an essay about the rest of the book (it reminds me of the half chapter in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a novel similarly on the edge of novel-ness). In "Truly," Handler suggests both that the book is unified and that you're a bit foolish for chasing the unification:

Nobody keeps score, because there's no sense in keeping track of what everything is doing. You might as well trace birds through a book, [...] or follow the pop songs that stick in people's heads or follow the people themselves, although you're likely to confuse them, as so many people in this book have the same names. You can't follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas. You can't follow Adam or Allison or Keith, up to Seattle or down to San Francisco or across-- three thousand miles, as the bird flies-- to New York City, and anyway they don't matter. (193-4)

I would argue, then, that the book is unified by its very lack of unity: the reader of Adverbs seeks coherence in an incoherent universe, much as all the characters in the book do. And creating coherence in an incoherent universe, or at least raising the spectre of coherence and then destroying it, is precisely what the novel is all about. (My students liked the book, and did indeed say it was a novel, but I think maybe they just wanted the discussion to end so that class would be over.) show less