Post by MyKindEditor on Feb 7, 2010 5:21:39 GMT -5
Mesmerising Young Minds
Philip Womack on the enigma behind Lemony Snicket’s children’s books.
Lemony Snicket is known to millions of children worldwide as the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, which are being published in paperback over the course of this year. In these 13 titles the author presents himself as a lonely journalist who has had more than his fair share of tragedy, and who spends his time reporting the terrible things( fires, shipwrecks, villains and cold cucumber soup) that happen with increasing regularity to the Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus and the near-psychotic baby, Sunny.
But the enigmatic, accordion-playing, caustically witty Snicket is an artful creation. The books are, in fact, written by the gentler though no less discomfiting Daniel Handler. He looks bearishly large, square-jawed and bulky. One minute he is fixing me with a peculiar gaze, the next he is grinning charmingly. “It’s a fun thing to do,” Handler says, in soft Californian tones. “I was really interested in having the books published under the name of a narrator who was this shadowy figure, and then we had these blurry photographs of me running in the snow, [they appeared in the early editions] and it just developed out of that But I don’t feel it’s taking me over.”
Handler, who was born in Los Angeles in 1970, was a struggling writer in the late Nineties when an editor at HarperCollins took a chance on him. “It felt like a fortune, but it was, in fact, a very small amount of money.” Luck is the overarching deity in Handler’s life. When I ask him how he feels about the way his books have changed children’s literature, he looks startled. “I think I just lucked into an era,” he replies, gazing into the distance. “The feeling in America was that children’s literature wasn’t getting attention- then the explosion of JK Rowling meant that it became something that began to be talked about.”
Rowling’s books are in the classic line of children’s books- despite their supposed darkness, they happen in a world with known boundaries and they always end on a high note. Handler subverts that, thriving on the gruesome and the unknown. The dastardly Count Olaf is constantly biting at the Baudelaire children’s heels. The narration is droll and world-weary. The vocabulary is challenging ad there is a nary whiff of a happy ending. The final volumes produce as many corpses as a Jacobean tragedy.
Despite its originality the series does have a recognisable lineage. “Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey where enormous for me as a child,” Handler says, “and when I started doing this, I definitely kept them in mind.” The self-referentiality of the books can be traced back to his love of Vladimir Nabokov. “I was a Nabokov freak,” Handler says wistfully. “There’s something about the way he writes that drags my brain right in.” He says there is something Nabokovian about Lemony Snicket. “He’s an unreliable narrator, he’s distracted by detail and digression until detail and digression become the point of the thing.” Handler has written adult (“that sounds kind of dirty”) novels under his own name, which exhibit a similar playfulness.
Under the shell of Lemony Snicket, there hides a family man. Handler is married with a six-year-old son. But he says he doesn’t write for him: “I tell him stories, not stories that anyone should write down. I have some anxiety about him reading the books- it’s not that they’re so scary he can’t take them, it’s more that it would break my heart if he found them boring.”
About his family, life, though, he is guarded, revealing only everyday details: he likes cooking, walking his son to school, playing music. It’s this discordance that is most intriguing about him: the shadow between the goofy real-life Handler, and his ravaged, obsessive alter ego. Flashes of dry humour bubble up. When I ask him about the hugely successful film of the first three books, he replies: “I was hired to write eight drafts of the screenplay and then I was fired. But I have a policy that I can’t say anything nasty about a movie that bought me a house.”
Death haunts the Snicket opus. In Handler’s books, as in life, nobody escapes death- and yet there is room for laughter, love and even redemption. We are hooked by the darkness, by our hunger for horror and chaos.
Handler won’t be drawn on the next four books, because they are “fetal”. He promises though, that they will take place in the in the same universe as the Series of Unfortunate Events. And the man behind the marvel? He is kind and intelligent, someone who, unlike his alter-ego, has the most extraordinary good fortune. As I leave, I ask him which of his characters he most identifies with, hoping that he’ll say Count Olaf or even Sunny. “Lemony Snicket,” he replies, typically deadpan. Of course.
Philip Womack on the enigma behind Lemony Snicket’s children’s books.
Lemony Snicket is known to millions of children worldwide as the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, which are being published in paperback over the course of this year. In these 13 titles the author presents himself as a lonely journalist who has had more than his fair share of tragedy, and who spends his time reporting the terrible things( fires, shipwrecks, villains and cold cucumber soup) that happen with increasing regularity to the Baudelaire children, Violet, Klaus and the near-psychotic baby, Sunny.
But the enigmatic, accordion-playing, caustically witty Snicket is an artful creation. The books are, in fact, written by the gentler though no less discomfiting Daniel Handler. He looks bearishly large, square-jawed and bulky. One minute he is fixing me with a peculiar gaze, the next he is grinning charmingly. “It’s a fun thing to do,” Handler says, in soft Californian tones. “I was really interested in having the books published under the name of a narrator who was this shadowy figure, and then we had these blurry photographs of me running in the snow, [they appeared in the early editions] and it just developed out of that But I don’t feel it’s taking me over.”
Handler, who was born in Los Angeles in 1970, was a struggling writer in the late Nineties when an editor at HarperCollins took a chance on him. “It felt like a fortune, but it was, in fact, a very small amount of money.” Luck is the overarching deity in Handler’s life. When I ask him how he feels about the way his books have changed children’s literature, he looks startled. “I think I just lucked into an era,” he replies, gazing into the distance. “The feeling in America was that children’s literature wasn’t getting attention- then the explosion of JK Rowling meant that it became something that began to be talked about.”
Rowling’s books are in the classic line of children’s books- despite their supposed darkness, they happen in a world with known boundaries and they always end on a high note. Handler subverts that, thriving on the gruesome and the unknown. The dastardly Count Olaf is constantly biting at the Baudelaire children’s heels. The narration is droll and world-weary. The vocabulary is challenging ad there is a nary whiff of a happy ending. The final volumes produce as many corpses as a Jacobean tragedy.
Despite its originality the series does have a recognisable lineage. “Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey where enormous for me as a child,” Handler says, “and when I started doing this, I definitely kept them in mind.” The self-referentiality of the books can be traced back to his love of Vladimir Nabokov. “I was a Nabokov freak,” Handler says wistfully. “There’s something about the way he writes that drags my brain right in.” He says there is something Nabokovian about Lemony Snicket. “He’s an unreliable narrator, he’s distracted by detail and digression until detail and digression become the point of the thing.” Handler has written adult (“that sounds kind of dirty”) novels under his own name, which exhibit a similar playfulness.
Under the shell of Lemony Snicket, there hides a family man. Handler is married with a six-year-old son. But he says he doesn’t write for him: “I tell him stories, not stories that anyone should write down. I have some anxiety about him reading the books- it’s not that they’re so scary he can’t take them, it’s more that it would break my heart if he found them boring.”
About his family, life, though, he is guarded, revealing only everyday details: he likes cooking, walking his son to school, playing music. It’s this discordance that is most intriguing about him: the shadow between the goofy real-life Handler, and his ravaged, obsessive alter ego. Flashes of dry humour bubble up. When I ask him about the hugely successful film of the first three books, he replies: “I was hired to write eight drafts of the screenplay and then I was fired. But I have a policy that I can’t say anything nasty about a movie that bought me a house.”
Death haunts the Snicket opus. In Handler’s books, as in life, nobody escapes death- and yet there is room for laughter, love and even redemption. We are hooked by the darkness, by our hunger for horror and chaos.
Handler won’t be drawn on the next four books, because they are “fetal”. He promises though, that they will take place in the in the same universe as the Series of Unfortunate Events. And the man behind the marvel? He is kind and intelligent, someone who, unlike his alter-ego, has the most extraordinary good fortune. As I leave, I ask him which of his characters he most identifies with, hoping that he’ll say Count Olaf or even Sunny. “Lemony Snicket,” he replies, typically deadpan. Of course.
