Finally I got my copy and read it today, and I liked it a lot. Maybe not more than ASoUE at its best, but quite a bit more than WCTBATH.
Now having also read through this thread, I see that Q.R.V already made a great
round up of most references. But as I was also collecting them while reading, I expanded a bit on some of the deeper connections for better understanding, so just for reference, I'm going to post my reference guide under a spoiler tag here as well. I've also included the references in the first three chapters, which I've already posted
previously, now slightly updated, for the sake of comprehensiveness.
When Did You See Her Last? Reference guide:Chapter 2:p.18 "...I could not quite place the smell. It was sweet but wrong, like an evil bunch of flowers."
Of course, a reference to Charles Baudelaire's
'Les Fleurs du Mal,' which has been referenced numerous times in ASoUE.
p.19 - Zada & Zora
So this one might be a stretch, but there's a female Croatian folk singer from the 60s/70s called
Zora Dubljevic, who's made a song called "
Zumbul Zada," which features some prominent accordion playing. I may be well off the mark here, but maybe it's a song Daniel Handler, an accordion player, has learned to play sometime, or just grown to like.
crono288 also pointed out that it might be a reference to the white-faced identical twins from Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast(1946-'59), called Clara and Cora, which are involved in the arson of a library. The series is described as a "fantasy of manners," which has more to do with "comedy of manners" than high fantasy, and also heavily draws on Gothic literature like ASoUE.
p.25 - "Colophon Clinic" (and p.73, "Colonel Colophon")
This has several potential allusions:
- Colophon was an
ancient city in Ionia, which was part of Ancient Greece. This would fit in with some of the other Ancient Greek references found in ATWQ, like Bellerophon.
- "Colophon" comes from the word κολοφών, which means "summit", and is also the origin of the bibliographic term "
colophon": In publishing, it is a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book such as the place of publication, the publisher, and the date of publication; In modern books they are usually located at the verso of the title-leaf.
- Colophony, or rosin, is a translucent brittle substance
used especially in varnishes and inks (primarily
printing ink), and is also
used for
pharmaceutical reasons.
p.27 - "Schoenberg Cereal"
A reference to composer Arnold Schoenberg, who invented the
Twelve-tone Technique, which laid the foundation for
Serialism composition (there being a pun on "cereal"/"serial"). Later in Chapter 3, it says the cereal's label reads "TWELVE WHOLESOME GRAINS COMBINED IN A STRICT SEQUENCE."
This can be see as a continuation of musical references following references to Duke Ellington and jazz, starting in the previous book.
p.28 - "Ingrid Nummet Knight"
Ingrid could be a reference to Ingrid Bergman, a famous actress prominent in the 1940s/50s, who also starred in numerous film noirs/crime films, like
Notorious,
Spellbound, or
Gaslight.
It appears that "nummet" is an obscure word (not unlike other words used in ATWQ, like "clusterous" or "bombinating"), that is defined as a "light meal or luncheon" (
source #1,
source #2).
The only thing that's for sure, though, is that it fits with the Knight family's proprietors of Ink Inc. having names with the initials "I.N.K." (see also: Ignatius Nettle Knight, p.73) (as pointed out by
Dante).
Chapter 3:In the chapter illustration there's a sign in the background that says 'Last Chance,' which may or may not be a reference to Snicket's
'The Hostile Hospital.'“A guy named Johnny takes the wrong train and ends up in Constantinople in 1453. This guy’s books are always good.”
Reference to
'The Trolley to Yesterday,' a novel from 1989, and the sixth volume in a series of children's gothic horror mystery novels by John Bellairs and Brad Strickland (this particular one written by the former), revolving around a character called Johnny Dixon. Possible plot parallels between this novel and WDYSHL is that 'Trolley'
starts out with Johnny worrying about his friend, Professor Childermass, because he's been acting "very weird" (like the Knight parents), and it involves a "talking statue" (like the Bombinating Beast?).
Also, Edward Gorey, who's been a major influence on ASoUE, provided covers and frontispieces for all but three of Bellairs's 15 children's works. (You can see Gorey's cover art for "Trolley"
here)
"“Where are we going, Snicket?” Pip asked me.
“To the lighthouse,” I said, which reminded me of a book I’d been meaning to read."
- Reference to the 1927 novel
'To The Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf, who has been previously referenced by Snicket in
'The Reptile Room' and
'The Unauthorized Autobiography.'Chapter 6p.79 - "If you like stories about strange happenings, allow me to recommend a book about a girl named Amanda, who is either a witch or stepsister or both."
'The Headless Cupid' (1985), by Zilpha Zeatley Snyder
p.108 - "(...) if you're looking for a good book to read, allow me to recommend a book I like called 'Despair.' The plot concerns two people who do not look at all alike but nevertheless hatch a nefarious plan." [Dashiell Qwerty]
'Despair' (1936), by Vladimir Nabokov, a novel involving doppelgängers, a theme also prevalent in this book, with Ellington as Cleo, Moxie as Snicket, or the Zada and Zora twins (or the two white-faced women from ASoUE)
p.122f - "The three books were all by the same author, and I recommend all three of them. There is one about a girl who spies on her neighbours and one about creepy notes that ruin people's summer and one about a family that does not change even though the children want it to."
'Harriet The Spy,' 'The Long Secret,' and 'Nobody's Family Is Going to Change,' all by Louise Fitzhugh, in that order, and all three of which have been already mentioned in the previous ATWQ volume, 'Who Could That Be At This Hour?' on
p.159f.
Chapter 7p.137 - "It's the name of an author from Sweden. (...) She wrote a book about a girl with a long name and long braids who has adventures with her neighbours."
The famous
Pippi Longstocking children's series, consisting of
three novels (1945-'48), by Astrid Lindgren.
Chapter 9p.170 - "It's complicated," I said. "It's like a story so long that you end up getting lost in it. Do you know that one about the big fight over an apple and a pretty woman?"
"The one that ends with a hollow statue and a ghost who likes to bury things?"
Reference to the Trojan War, most notably told through Homer's
Iliad: The big fight is one among Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite over a golden apple with the inscription, "To the Fairest," which becomes the precursor to the war, because Aphrodite bribes the judge of the competition with her hand in marriage, even though she is already married to king Agamemnon. The ghost mentioned is of one of the fallen soldiers in the war, Patroclus, who tells his commander to bury his bones in an urn. (
source #1,
source #2)
Chapter 10p.199 - "Farnsworth Pulpeater Moths"
May be a reference to
Farnsworth Wright, who was the editor of the pulp magazine
'Weird Tales', which regularly published notable authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.
p.209 - "I would have told them about a book I was thinking about on the drive. It was a book about a girl named Kit who acquires a reputation for witchcraft. It gets her into a lot of trouble, but she does manage to find someone she can trust. His name is Nathaniel, and he names a ship after her. The ship is called
The Witch, but I couldn't remember the name of the author. I also didn't want to think about who liked this book more than I did, someone whose was also Kit."
'The Witch of Blackbird Pond' (1958) by Elizabeth George Speare, a children's novel set in late-17th century New England.
Chapter 12p.246 - "I was chained up in a basement and forced to continue my experiments. I had it worse than that girl in that book, who goes to live with that family the Reeds, and everyone is cruel to her."
"It's a wonderful book," I couldn't help saying, and I reminded her of the title.
'Jane Eyre' (1847), by Charlotte Brontë under the pen name "Currer Bell"
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For your convenience, here are the references I found from Chapter 4 onwards, that have not yet been mentioned (compare with list above): Chapter 6, p.122; Ch. 10, p.199; and minor facts like: Nabokov's 'Despair' being centered around the theme of doppelgängers, which brings to mind Ellington as Cleo, Moxie as Snicket, or Zada and Zora, or the two white-faced women in ASoUE; how Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre under the pseudonym "Currer
Bell"; and I expanded a bit on the Trojan War (like on the "ghost who likes to bury things") (Ch. 9, p.170).
Add. Note: I didn't figure out the allusion to
Les Gommes by Alain Robbe-Grillet, which Hermes mentioned, and now I don't have WDYSHL on me, so I don't know the page number and exact quote.
Some passages I liked a lot:
I loved the part on p.77, when Lemony Snicket is sweeping his hair after the haircut by Moxie, thinking "Some people are so sentimental that they keep locks of hair from people they love, but nobody wanted what I was sweeping."
Or the passage about finding yourself in a really ridiculous sad situation in your life, on p.94f.
Or in chapter 3: "(...) no matter how splendid and shiny the world might be, it could be spoiled by something you didn't notice until the damage had been done."
Observations:
So on p.122 when Dashiell says "Who you are and what you read is private in a library. The world--" and then gets interrupted by Snicket, strongly indicates he wanted to say "The world is quiet here," which would mean that he's in VFD, and Snicket also suspects something, as he says (p.197) "It might be serendipity or it might be something else," when Moxie tells him about Qwerty leaving a helpful book lying around.
I've also gotten the suspicion that we might never get to know the importance of the Bombinating Beast statue. It may be this series' equivalent to ASoUE's sugar bowl, i.e. it merely being a McGuffin, like the Maltese Falcon statuette, or the briefcase in Kiss Me Deadly, or even the unexplained briefcases in Ronin (which Handler mentioned in an ATWQ-relating interview) or Pulp Fiction (which is also inspired by similar noir fiction). Basically if its value is not explained in the third book, I don't really see Handler explaining it in the last book as a big revelation that changes anything; it just doesn't seem to be his style.
Like some of you already mentioned, I also find the name The Inhumane Society oddly uncreative. But not only that, it seems to be kind of in contradiction with Snicket's philosophy of evil people not being evil for the sake of evil, but for making the wrong decisions.
I also thought Armstrong Feint to be a reference to Louis Armstrong like his daughter is to Duke Ellington. Snicket's description of the sad/hopeful song on Armstrong Feint's music box also reminded me of something like "It's a Beautiful World."
Now having read the book I want to repeat my saying how much this volume's general setting reminded me of the French horror film "Eyes Without a Face" - a very poetic movie, featuring a "mad scientist" character like Dr. Flammarion, who also has a dangerous/murderous accomplice/henchwoman in a nurse, like Nurse Dander, and a tragic and disfigured character that wears a white mask, like the mummified Colonel Colophon, and the story partially taking place in a big, gothic castle, like the Colophon Clinic, and there even are imprisoned animals for experiment purposes, like in the Aquarium. Considering Handler is hip with films like Tourneur's
Cat People, I'd say it's quite possible for it to have been an inspiration.
Oh, and one crazy half-theory for good measure: The tree that was cut down in order to put up the Colonel statue is the source of the wood not only used to make the BB statue, but also placed in the tadpoles' aquariums, and it's somehow related to the Farnsworth Pulpeater Moths. Maybe those also have something to do with the birds disappearing from Stain'd, and/or maybe the town's lighthouse is still used to attract the moths? I know this is not coherent, but I feel like there's something in there and maybe someone else will get a better idea with these puzzle pieces.
