DANIEL HANDLER on bbc 4 radio

[champ103]

He's discussing adverbs and The End, not revealing much...only on the UK, I tuned in halfway

I'll update in a minute

UPDATE: Short interveiw in the end, he discussed adverbs for the most of it, before they talked about ASOUE. He said that he enjoys writing children's fiction, discussed the release date, before claiming that the end of ASOUE would definatley NOT be the end of Lemony Snicket, which is good news. I also noticed how he in this-and a television appearence on last week-never mentions the title of the 13th book. Something good for all you The End-haters there.

[Akbar Le Grey]

dupin said:

HHe said that he enjoys writing children's fiction, discussed the release date, before claiming that the end of ASOUE would definatley NOT be the end of Lemony Snicket, which is good news.

That's great! I'm sure he can make loads of spinoffs; Quags, VFD, Snickets.

[joker]

I hope!

[SnicketFires]

I rather hope that he doesn't make a lot of spinoffs, but I'm glad that Snicket is planning to stick around after the end of the series (I guess that proves that he doesn't die in the series as well).

Handler seems to be making up for lost time in the UK.

[Phoebonica]

You can listen to it here. That link only works till Wednesday though.

[s]

"I didn't want to write a more typical love novel which stars maybe two people, or at worst, a third with a sinister moustache."

Heh. Thanks for the link.

[the summerbee]

Thank you for the link! Though, I do hope there aren't a load of spinoffs, they would get old before long. One or two would be fine, I guess.

[Gigi]

Is there any way to download it to listen to again later?

I rather enjoyed the interview. It's refreshing to hear Daniel Handler talk about his writing and future plans without him always hamming it up as "Lemony Snicket's associate". It was very different from his performances at his book signings.

[SnicketFires]

The link doesn't work for me. It brings me to a white screen and stops loading. Is anyone going to post a transcript?

[Dante]

Lemony Snicket is the made-up name of an author who’s sold more than forty million books worldwide. I’ll be talking to the man who banks his royalty cheques, Daniel Handler. … First, Daniel Handler may not be a household name, and yet with sales topping the forty million mark, there’s a good chance that at least one of his stories will have found its way into the homes of regular book-buyers. Daniel Handler is the real name of the elusive author Lemony Snicket, whose Series of Unfortunate Events has been told over the course of twelve bestselling books so far. The word “unfortunate” underplays the theme of the series, in which three children are relentlessly pursued by their evil uncle, Count Olaf, after their parents die in a house fire. Lemony Snicket presents a grim world-view for children; things start out bad, get worse, and there’s no happily ever after. Now, seven years after the Snicket series started, Daniel Handler’s returned to the world of adult fiction with a novel called Adverbs; the more grown-up intentions of the title are played out in the book which comprises a series of closely-connected short stories about love affairs. Earlier, I asked Daniel Handler why he’s turned his attention back to the adults.

I had planned on writing an entirely different novel, and instead I kept cheating, and sneaking off to write about ten people in love, and the pages just piled up ‘cause I kept returning to Lemony Snicket novels in the interim, and I, I had a thousand pages, and still no workable plan, which is – that’s not a nice feeling. So I put it aside for a while because I, as sort of punishment, and only gradually did I come back to it and to think that rather than sort of a narrative link, rather than finding a more standard arc I could find a thematic or even philosophical treatise that could guide me through it, I –

This is probably more ambitious, in that, in terms of conventions of a novel; it’s a series of short stories, vaguely connected, possibly unconnected, in which characters fall in and out of love in all the different many ways of the world.

Yes.

And did you have a set of characters in mind, because there are characters who share the same names, the same characteristics, but possibly are not even the same people.

Well it, it just became apparent to me, and thinking about love, that indeed the people start not to matter when you’re taking a sort of a wider view at the thing of it, that it’s the endlessly same types of people bumping up against one another, and I didn’t want to write a more typical love novel which stars maybe two people, or at worst a third with a sinister moustache, and I didn’t want to create an ensemble piece that would feel like a season of a soap opera, or something. Is the term “soap opera” legal here?

Soap opera?

[laughs]

Oh yes, we know what soap opera is.

Alright. And –

It’s not soap operatic at all.

No, well that was – thank goodness you say that, because that was not my goal, and –

In effect you’ve written a series of vignettes, and fantastical as well, so that there is a link to the Lemony Snicket novels in a way so this wasn’t a complete reaction against writing the Snicket novels.

No, not necessarily, although I think it’s no coincidence that romantic love is such the theme because that’s pretty much the one thing you can’t put in a children’s book, you can even put sex in one if you do it right but you really can’t put romantic love, just because there’s something so far from the realm of childhood that –

Children just go “Eugh!”

Yeah, and just the nuts and bolts of what really love is, other than a sort of vague prince and princess feeling which again, put in childhood books, but the everyday, having coffee with someone and being in love with them but maybe being irritated at the same time, that kind of thing is just not really welcome in children’s lit.

The book is called Adverbs –

Yes.

– And each chapter title is a single word, a single adverb, and they are of course words that modify verbs, and nouns, and that I presume is the point of the novel, that it’s not just about love, but about the way in which love is expressed, or experienced, or the way it fails, or –

Precisely.

Or the way it feels.

That is exactly the point, that is in fact why some of the characters are so blurry, and whether they’re the same characters or not was to emphasise that it is not the nouns, it is not the object of one’s affection, it’s actually how you go about getting it or how you go about keeping it or how you go about losing it, and that just seemed more interesting to me, and actually closer to the point when one tries to pin down what is actually sort of a slippery emotion.

There are authorial interventions throughout, aren’t there, as you do with the Lemony Snicket books, we are aware in the Lemony Snicket books that there is a narrator, an author called Lemony Snicket, and you have your authorial asides in these descriptions of people’s lives unfolding or getting together, that’s because life is messy and complicated and there are no straight edges, it’s all about overlaps, I presume.

Yes, that’s what I think it is, and also that because it, because it has this sort of philosophical tone, because it’s an inquiry into love, that, that such things feel like they come from one brain, which, which in fact they did, and it seemed only natural that I should step in from time to time and make sure all was right. Also in looking at novels with somewhat unusual structures, that was invariably what happens, I looked at Cloud Atlas by your Mr. Mitchell, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Tragedy Kundera, and a novel called The Law of Enclosures by Dale Peck who I don’t know if you mix with much on these shores, but, an American author I admire, and all of them, all of those books have unusual structures and all of them require some word of explanation at some point.

With the first story in the book, Immediately, the man breaks up with his girlfriend, they say goodbye quite suddenly on the street, and he hails a cab, and he wants to get to [?] Station, because he wants to go far away, doesn’t know where he’s going, and immediately, he falls in love with the cab driver, and invites him for a coffee. It’s, it’s, in the conventional sense, it’s, it’s not believable.

[laughs] No, and yet love at first sight is something that we’re taught happens all the time, and in fact many a novel begins with two people who, who catch eyes across a crowded room and, and immediately fancy one another, it, and it always frustrated me, that that was devised as something that might happen every day, and yet that’s, I don’t know anyone actually who’s fallen in love in that way, and I began to think about it, when there’s so many novels that begin with a meeting cute that was their way to play with that a little, and see that actually if you decided you were in love with someone at first sight and they weren’t interested in you then that would really manifest itself more as a kind of despair than any kind of love, and indeed our hero gets in quite a bit of trouble there in the cab.

Lemony Snicket series: Hugely successful, you’ve written I think now the thirteenth and final book, and that will be published this year.

Yes. Friday the 13th of October.

[laughs]

We got lucky there.

The thirteenth book on the 13th. Of October. And so why have you, have you felt the need to kill off the series?

Oh, well, it was always planned to be thirteen volumes, in fact, when I originally told the idea that I had to this editor, I said “…and there will be thirteen volumes,” it was only she who said, “Well, let’s see how the first couple do.” It was always my plan, because I always thought that the only thing more interesting than terrible things happening to three children would be thirteen books in which terrible things happen to three children, and so, yes, people keep saying, “Why did you decide to knock it off?” and actually the pathetic thing is that I probably would have written them even if no-one had noticed them, and so I always knew where I was going with the thirteenth volume and now at last, I’ve arrived.

And so you’ve been given licence to create a fantastical children’s series in which you’re kind of very much let off the leash; you can enter this magical world, and yet paradoxically the more the series becomes successful the more there is the expectation from the readers and I’m wondering whether returning to adult fiction, it’s almost a return to the real world for you.

Well, it’s, it’s strange because one after writing so many children’s books one thinks of the audience a lot, and not necessarily because of the commercial success or that kind of expectation, I’ve found myself returning to my own childhood memories again and again, and what I like to read and what kind of experience I had with books and what I thought would be frightening, and that’s something you don’t hear a lot of adult novelists discuss, they often say, “Well, this was a story that’s important for me to tell, or an historical detail that I found so fascinating it became a story that was important,” but not a lot of, well, what, what do people want to read? And that’s an interesting way, it’s been an interesting way for me to return to adult fiction, both with Adverbs and with the novel that I’m working on now, that I can’t help but think, what sort of reader am I imagining? And I don’t know if that’s liberating or constricting, but it’s, but nevertheless it’s the situation I’m in!

It didn’t feel like a liberation to be able to write an adult book again after the expectations that are almost imposed on you from your –

Not a liberation, no, I don’t, I don’t, I haven’t found the whole Snicket books to be really a hardship, I’ve enjoyed writing them and it’s been wonderful practice for different types of writing.

So, saying goodbye to Lemony Snicket, are you therefore also saying goodbye to children’s fiction?

Oh no I don’t think so, I actually don’t necessarily think it will be goodbye to Lemony Snicket, but it is in fact goodbye to A Series of Unfortunate Events. I mean, if anything, with this state of literary fiction in the world today, it’s tempting, it’s tempting never to return to adult fiction! I won’t do that either. You never love a book the way you love a book when you’re eleven, and it’s been exciting to meet so many eleven-year-olds who have my book in their hands, and I, and really with adult fiction people have a responsibility, they can’t stay up all night reading your book because they’ve got to go to bed.

Daniel Handler. His new book Adverbs is published now and the final Lemony Snicket adventure is published in October.

[Antenora]

ffwf said:

The thirteenth book on the 13th. Of October. And so why have you, have you felt the need to kill off the series?

Oh, well, it was always planned to be thirteen volumes, in fact, when I originally told the idea that I had to this editor, I said “…and there will be thirteen volumes,” it was only she who said, “Well, let’s see how the first couple do.” It was always my plan, because I always thought that the only thing more interesting than terrible things happening to three children would be thirteen books in which terrible things happen to three children, and so, yes, people keep saying, “Why did you decide to knock it off?” and actually the pathetic thing is that I probably would have written them even if no-one had noticed them, and so I always knew where I was going with the thirteenth volume and now at last, I’ve arrived.

That's quite interesting. I'd always thought the series had been originally intended as a trilogy(or a shorter series anyway), possibly because of another article or interview someplace. Good to have that clarified.

It's a great interview. Thank you muchly for transcribing it, Dante.

[Dante]

tocuna said:

That's quite interesting. I'd always thought the series had been originally intended as a trilogy(or a shorter series anyway), possibly because of another article or interview someplace. Good to have that clarified.

I think our view was that he wanted thirteen volumes, but wasn't sure if he'd get to publish more than a few, so he initially erred on the side of caution.

And yeah, transcribing that took ages, so I hope everyone appreciates it. For their own sakes.

[Akbar Le Grey]

*appreciates it greatly*

Thanks, Dante. 'Twas quite interesting and informative. (:

[Phoebonica]

They only keep the programmes up for a week, and I don't know of any way to save them. But we've got Dante's (excellent, and much appreciated) transcript now.

[Gigi]

Yes! Thanks, Dante!