Repeated sentences

[gliquey]

I heard somewhere that one sentence from each chapter of TBB is repeated in TE. I've managed to locate a few:

Chapter 1: I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes. (1-1; 13-2)
Chapter 4: "I can't tell you how much we appreciate this," Violet said... (1-43; 13-71)
Chapter 9: To those who hadn't been around Violet long, nothing would have seemed unusual, but those who knew her well knew that when she tied her hair up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes, it meant that the gears and levers of her inventing brain were whirring at top speed.

I've found a couple of others, but need to leave now, so I'll edit this post and add them later. If anyone knows the whole list, or just any other than those three, please post here.

[Dante]

Yes, this is quite correct, and I know there are lists out there. I'll see if I can dig them up, which hopefully will be less work than just going and getting them all again on my own account, even though I'd recognise them by sight. Yep, here we go:

Dec 6, 2008 14:02:22 GMT -5 Dante said:

They're quite obvious in retrospect - people probably noticed several subconsciously, at least, without realising it was consistently true - and there should be a list somewhere. (A couple, I think, are merely paraphrased.) Ah, here's mine, although I know they've been listed elsewhere:

Chapter One:
I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes. (BB 1, TE 2)
Chapter Two:
It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the hours that followed. (BB 11 (paraphrase), TE 23)
Chapter Three:
“…your initial opinion on just about anything may change over time.” (BB 28, TE 62)
Chapter Four:
“I can’t tell you how much we appreciate this,” Violet said, careful… (BB 43, TE 71)
Chapter Five:
The family had arrived at the banking district, pausing to rest at the Fountain of Victorious Finance… (BB 62 (paraphrase), TE 105)
Chapter Six:
His face was very serious, as if he were very sorry to hear that, but his eyes were shiny and bright, they way they are when someone is telling a joke. (BB 73, TE 124)
Chapter Seven:
“But what to do?” (BB 91, TE 146)
Chapter Eight:
Some mornings, his father would come into Klaus’s room to wake him up and find him asleep, still clutching his flashlight in one hand and his book in the other (BB 93; TE 171)
Chapter Nine:
To those who hadn’t been around Violet long, nothing would have seemed unusual, but those who knew her well knew that when she tied her hair up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes, it meant that the gears and levers of her inventing brain were whirring at top speed. (BB 111, TE 199)
Chapter Ten:
…all day, the two siblings had wandered around the house, doing their assigned chores and scarcely speaking to each other. (BB 113 (paraphrase), TE 212)
Chapter Eleven:
... that everything was all right, but of course everything was not all right. Everything was all wrong… (BB 127 (paraphrase), TE 239)
Chapter Twelve:
Three very short men were carrying a large, flat piece of wood, painted to look like a living room. (BB 134 (paraphrase), TE 275)
Chapter Thirteen:
...it seemed to the children that things were moving in an aberrant—the word “aberrant” here means “very, very wrong, and causing much grief”—direction. (BB 162 (paraphrase), TE 320)

Some also link baby Beatrice's cry of "Cake!" in Chapter Fourteen to Sunny's cry of the same in Chapter Thirteen of TBB, but I think that's rather shaky ground, myself.

[Skelly Craig]

Cool, I didn't know that. I only knew of Chapter Twelve's sentence, and recall having semi-consciously recognized a couple sentences in TE, like Dante said in the quoted post.

[gliquey]

I think I had faint recognition of the sentences in chapter 1 and 12 (which is clever but obvious) upon my first reading, but like you said Dante, didn't realize it was a consistent pattern. I skimmed through TBB, and then looked for any sentences which would seem easy to repeat in TE, and found chapters 2, 4, 9 and 13.

Chapter 3, is said by Snicket in TBB but a character (Ishmael) in TE. Interesting, but probably the reason why I didn't notice it.

I did wonder if the Fountain of Victorious Finance appearing in both chapter 5s was relevant, but didn't find any phrases duplicated exactly. ...the [three children/family had] arrived at the banking district, pausing to [take a refreshing sip of water/rest] at the Fountain of Victorious Finance... is close enough, I suppose, but I did wonder if there was anything closer. The "had arrived" in TE vs simply "arrived" in TBB threw me off, I think, but the "had" in TE serves to emphasize that the memory happened in the past.

The sentences in chapters 6 and 9 are very common: descriptions of Olaf's eyes and Violet's ribbon are common, and I only noticed the latter because it was the last sentence of the chapter in TBB.

Chapter 7 is quite interesting - I don't think the sentence quite seems right in TBB, but feels fine when Sunny says it. I should have definitely noticed chapter 8's.

With chapter 10, the phrases were very, very close but not exact - the difference between "the" and "their", but there is given context for the chores in TBB, so "the" wouldn't work as well (IMO) in TE.

Chapter 11's is good.

[Dante]

I think my favourite is Chapter Twelve, because it's the most blatant, but the context makes it appropriately inappropriate.

[gliquey]

Sept 3, 2014 11:13:09 GMT -5 Dante said:

I think my favourite is Chapter Twelve, because it's the most blatant, but the context makes it appropriately inappropriate.

Yes, it definitely is the sort of thing Handler would do anyway, but it's a wonderful point to put in a reference to TBB. I wonder why, since it's the most obviously cut-and-paste from TBB, why there's an extra comma in TE - maybe it's the work of some editor who didn't understand the reference but thought that a comma between "large" and "flat" was more grammatically accurate. Possibly it reflects on Handler's style of writing developing over the past 7 years: I thought for a moment, comparing the first and last books, that maybe Handler's writing was a bit different, but maybe I'm going mad.

His writing style certainly is interesting, though; while I would use colons, semi-colons and brackets, he just seems to use hyphens everywhere. You can spot the occasional bracket or colon (with a capital letter following, which I was always taught was wrong), but they're quite rare.

[Dante]

I think colons look better with a capital letter following, but that might just be from reading ASoUE. I do wonder why some of the quotes aren't quite formatted right, though, but there are a few little errors like that throughout the series, so I suppose it's not unusual.

[Hermes]

Colon + capital letter is a specifically American thing, I think, and even there some people say the rule is not to do it all the time, but only when what follows the colon is a complete sentence.

[gliquey]

Sept 3, 2014 14:12:29 GMT -5 Hermes said:

Colon + capital letter is a specifically American thing, I think, and even there some people say the rule is not to do it all the time, but only when what follows the colon is a complete sentence.

I Googled it and found a brief explanation of someone's thoughts on the matter, which were similar to what you've said. I remember "Very nearby" once followed a colon (TMM?) and I disliked the capital there, but tolerated it (earlier on the same page, I think) when a capitalized question followed a colon.

In regards to other punctuation, I quite like semi-colons; maybe Handler's missing something by not including them.