Post by Dante on Jan 12, 2015 3:41:41 GMT -5
Apparently Daniel Handler is in Ireland at the moment, being given honorary membership of Trinity's Philosophical Society, and while he's there, he's done this rather interesting interview:
www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/lemony-snicket-s-piratical-sabbatical-1.2060245?page=1
Edit: Link presently, mysteriously, defunct.
Lemony Snicket’s piratical sabbatical
Daniel Handler, the real author of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’, has returned to a childhood fantasy for ‘We Are Pirates’, his new novel for adults
Sara Keating
It is the run-up to Christmas, and Daniel Handler finds himself sitting in Dublin in improbable circumstances. “Well, I woke up one morning,” he says, “and there was an envelope waiting for me, and inside was an invitation offering me honorary membership of Trinity’s Philosophical Society. I thought, Well, I have never been to Ireland, so that would be cool – and any prize Bram Stoker, Conan O’Brien and Winston Churchill have received is good enough for me.”
Handler betrays no surprise at the unexpected invitation – and why would he? He is the type of writer whose work attracts strange and unusual encounters with fans. Best known for his work as Lemony Snicket, the narrator of a 13-part series for children, Handler has flown in from New York rather than his native San Francisco, where he was compering a fan-fiction event that placed characters from A Series of Unfortunate Events in erotic scenarios. “Needless to say,” he deadpans, “it was not an event for children – and I should also state that the writers were not allowed to use children in their stories, either.”
Instead there were lots of tales about the dastardly Count Olaf in compromising circumstances and “two incidences of octopus-human sex”. X-rated scenario aside, you can imagine this happening in one of Handler’s brilliantly surreal Gothic books.
Handler has also written five novels for adults, including We Are Pirates, which will be published in February. “I have been fascinated by pirates since I was at school,” he says. “When I was in eighth grade we had to do this career survey where we had to answer lots of questions about ourselves – interests, preferences, all that – and they would suggest what kind of job would suit you. Then you had to decide what you thought you would like to do based on this new psychological knowledge. They had a list of nearly every job you could ever imagine, and then ‘other’, where you had to fill in the blank. “Me and a friend got everyone in our homeroom to tick ‘other’ and put in ‘pirate’. We got in a lot of trouble, because apparently the survey was part of some broader statistical project, and it looked like whatever per cent of kids in California wanted to be pirates.”
Handler says he returned to the idea of piracy again and again over the years. “I suppose it is the strange mix of glamorous escape and dire reality that attracted me: the swashbuckling dream of living past all law and reason when, in reality, you are actually behaving abominably.”
When he finally sat down to write about pirates he thought “about groups who are overlooked by or are maybe outcasts from society, and what I ended up with was a group of teenage girls and the denizens of an old-age home taking to the high seas together.”
Drama in teenage setting
The protagonist of We Are Pirates is Gwen Needle, the misunderstood daughter of a big-shot radio producer, who is struggling to survive on the competitive airwaves. It is not the first time Handler has used the heady stage of adolescence for his fiction. His first novel, The Basic Eight, is about a high-school murder; Why We Broke Up is a letter from a jilted teenage girl to her ex-boyfriend. Handler says there is inherent drama in the teenage setting. “I mean, if you have an idea about someone walking along a road at night, and that person is a man, well, there might be a story there. But if it is a teenage girl it is already fraught with tension. And when I was thinking about pirates, I asked myself, What sort of people would have the impulsiveness and recklessness to steal a boat? And I thought, Teenagers and old people.”
It was for similar reasons that Handler, writing as Snicket, decided to make orphans of the Baudelaire children who are the centrepiece of A Series of Unfortunate Events. “There are so many orphans in literature, because of the freedom they give the writer – and the kids. There aren’t any parents there to reign the drama in.”
Handler’s own parents – an opera singer and an accountant – were encouraging of Handler’s desire to write, despite the fact that the career survey he completed at school pointed towards a future as a lighthouse keeper. “I thought that was hilarious,” he says. “I am a social being, and I would be totally unsuited to sitting locked in a tower all on my own. Also, I don’t like bad weather.” Indeed, contrary to stereotype, Handler relishes the public aspect of his work as a writer, and his appearances as Snicket are renowned. He says he loves the fact that talking with nine-year-olds allows him to be theatrical.
When the first Snicket book was published, with a “photo of me shrouded on the jacket cover, the publishers asked me what I was going to do when I went in to do a talk at a school. I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and they said I should go and visit some other authors. So I went and watched and thought they were incredibly boring. I spoke to one writer, and asked about her talk, and she said she wanted to dispel the mystery of writing. I thought, Why would you want to dispel the mystery of writing? So I decided I would increase the mystery of writing instead.
“I mean, if a kid wants to come see Lemony Snicket they are probably after something more than me showing up to say that I write at a desk. So instead I explain that Lemony Snicket couldn’t make it, and I come up with some dubious explanation as to why he couldn’t been there. They know, of course, they are being lied to, but I guess they are kind of used to that, seeing as they are at school, and they usually spend the time trying to get me to admit to being him, so that it becomes a complicated dance.”
Balancing his work for children with a more mature output is not so difficult. “I don’t really see it as writing for different audiences,” Handler says, “more for different genres: there is a set of conventions, and I need to be mindful of them.” But he is occasionally frustrated by the lowlier status accorded to writing for young people. “Children’s literature was in an invisible ghetto for a long time,” he says, “and it was just ending as I started, so I suppose now it gets more mainstream attention than it used to. But it doesn’t seem like it has gained much literary respect. If you were to see a piece where 10 prominent authors were asked their opinion on the importance of the election, or environmental issues, you can be sure that not one of them would be a children’s writer.”
Reading around
Handler’s own literary preferences are wide and varied. “Edward Gorey was a huge thing for me when I was small. Carson McCullers when I was a teenager. Nabakov when I was in college.” Now he reads an enormous range of world literature, he says, a deliberate task he set himself, and which he has been recording for the online magazine the Believer.
“It was a few years back,” he says, “and I started reading this book and found it absolutely incomprehensible. I looked at the back and saw that it had won the Nobel prize for literature. It made me look to see which other writers had won the prize. There were writers who are well known, but loads I had never heard of, and I wondered whether they had been unfairly overlooked or justly forgotten. So I started reading, one a month, and recording my thoughts” for the Believer.
What he found was that the “spectrum of literature worldwide is so much broader – nationally, philosophically, aesthetically – than I had realised. If you mostly read in your native language you think it’s diverse because there is diversity within it, but when you are looking at a 19th-century epic poem or something, you get a really fresh perspective.”
The strangest thing he has read in translation, however, was not from the Nobel list. It was a novel, translated from German, in which Handler himself appears on the cover. It was a promotional photograph taken by a friend when Handler was starting out, and which he permitted to be sold as a stock image in lieu of payment. By the time anyone realised, the book was already printed, and it has appeared all over the world. Just another day in the weird world of Lemony Snicket.
We Are Pirates is published by Bloomsbury.
www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/lemony-snicket-s-piratical-sabbatical-1.2060245?page=1
Edit: Link presently, mysteriously, defunct.
Lemony Snicket’s piratical sabbatical
Daniel Handler, the real author of ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’, has returned to a childhood fantasy for ‘We Are Pirates’, his new novel for adults
Sara Keating
It is the run-up to Christmas, and Daniel Handler finds himself sitting in Dublin in improbable circumstances. “Well, I woke up one morning,” he says, “and there was an envelope waiting for me, and inside was an invitation offering me honorary membership of Trinity’s Philosophical Society. I thought, Well, I have never been to Ireland, so that would be cool – and any prize Bram Stoker, Conan O’Brien and Winston Churchill have received is good enough for me.”
Handler betrays no surprise at the unexpected invitation – and why would he? He is the type of writer whose work attracts strange and unusual encounters with fans. Best known for his work as Lemony Snicket, the narrator of a 13-part series for children, Handler has flown in from New York rather than his native San Francisco, where he was compering a fan-fiction event that placed characters from A Series of Unfortunate Events in erotic scenarios. “Needless to say,” he deadpans, “it was not an event for children – and I should also state that the writers were not allowed to use children in their stories, either.”
Instead there were lots of tales about the dastardly Count Olaf in compromising circumstances and “two incidences of octopus-human sex”. X-rated scenario aside, you can imagine this happening in one of Handler’s brilliantly surreal Gothic books.
Handler has also written five novels for adults, including We Are Pirates, which will be published in February. “I have been fascinated by pirates since I was at school,” he says. “When I was in eighth grade we had to do this career survey where we had to answer lots of questions about ourselves – interests, preferences, all that – and they would suggest what kind of job would suit you. Then you had to decide what you thought you would like to do based on this new psychological knowledge. They had a list of nearly every job you could ever imagine, and then ‘other’, where you had to fill in the blank. “Me and a friend got everyone in our homeroom to tick ‘other’ and put in ‘pirate’. We got in a lot of trouble, because apparently the survey was part of some broader statistical project, and it looked like whatever per cent of kids in California wanted to be pirates.”
Handler says he returned to the idea of piracy again and again over the years. “I suppose it is the strange mix of glamorous escape and dire reality that attracted me: the swashbuckling dream of living past all law and reason when, in reality, you are actually behaving abominably.”
When he finally sat down to write about pirates he thought “about groups who are overlooked by or are maybe outcasts from society, and what I ended up with was a group of teenage girls and the denizens of an old-age home taking to the high seas together.”
Drama in teenage setting
The protagonist of We Are Pirates is Gwen Needle, the misunderstood daughter of a big-shot radio producer, who is struggling to survive on the competitive airwaves. It is not the first time Handler has used the heady stage of adolescence for his fiction. His first novel, The Basic Eight, is about a high-school murder; Why We Broke Up is a letter from a jilted teenage girl to her ex-boyfriend. Handler says there is inherent drama in the teenage setting. “I mean, if you have an idea about someone walking along a road at night, and that person is a man, well, there might be a story there. But if it is a teenage girl it is already fraught with tension. And when I was thinking about pirates, I asked myself, What sort of people would have the impulsiveness and recklessness to steal a boat? And I thought, Teenagers and old people.”
It was for similar reasons that Handler, writing as Snicket, decided to make orphans of the Baudelaire children who are the centrepiece of A Series of Unfortunate Events. “There are so many orphans in literature, because of the freedom they give the writer – and the kids. There aren’t any parents there to reign the drama in.”
Handler’s own parents – an opera singer and an accountant – were encouraging of Handler’s desire to write, despite the fact that the career survey he completed at school pointed towards a future as a lighthouse keeper. “I thought that was hilarious,” he says. “I am a social being, and I would be totally unsuited to sitting locked in a tower all on my own. Also, I don’t like bad weather.” Indeed, contrary to stereotype, Handler relishes the public aspect of his work as a writer, and his appearances as Snicket are renowned. He says he loves the fact that talking with nine-year-olds allows him to be theatrical.
When the first Snicket book was published, with a “photo of me shrouded on the jacket cover, the publishers asked me what I was going to do when I went in to do a talk at a school. I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and they said I should go and visit some other authors. So I went and watched and thought they were incredibly boring. I spoke to one writer, and asked about her talk, and she said she wanted to dispel the mystery of writing. I thought, Why would you want to dispel the mystery of writing? So I decided I would increase the mystery of writing instead.
“I mean, if a kid wants to come see Lemony Snicket they are probably after something more than me showing up to say that I write at a desk. So instead I explain that Lemony Snicket couldn’t make it, and I come up with some dubious explanation as to why he couldn’t been there. They know, of course, they are being lied to, but I guess they are kind of used to that, seeing as they are at school, and they usually spend the time trying to get me to admit to being him, so that it becomes a complicated dance.”
Balancing his work for children with a more mature output is not so difficult. “I don’t really see it as writing for different audiences,” Handler says, “more for different genres: there is a set of conventions, and I need to be mindful of them.” But he is occasionally frustrated by the lowlier status accorded to writing for young people. “Children’s literature was in an invisible ghetto for a long time,” he says, “and it was just ending as I started, so I suppose now it gets more mainstream attention than it used to. But it doesn’t seem like it has gained much literary respect. If you were to see a piece where 10 prominent authors were asked their opinion on the importance of the election, or environmental issues, you can be sure that not one of them would be a children’s writer.”
Reading around
Handler’s own literary preferences are wide and varied. “Edward Gorey was a huge thing for me when I was small. Carson McCullers when I was a teenager. Nabakov when I was in college.” Now he reads an enormous range of world literature, he says, a deliberate task he set himself, and which he has been recording for the online magazine the Believer.
“It was a few years back,” he says, “and I started reading this book and found it absolutely incomprehensible. I looked at the back and saw that it had won the Nobel prize for literature. It made me look to see which other writers had won the prize. There were writers who are well known, but loads I had never heard of, and I wondered whether they had been unfairly overlooked or justly forgotten. So I started reading, one a month, and recording my thoughts” for the Believer.
What he found was that the “spectrum of literature worldwide is so much broader – nationally, philosophically, aesthetically – than I had realised. If you mostly read in your native language you think it’s diverse because there is diversity within it, but when you are looking at a 19th-century epic poem or something, you get a really fresh perspective.”
The strangest thing he has read in translation, however, was not from the Nobel list. It was a novel, translated from German, in which Handler himself appears on the cover. It was a promotional photograph taken by a friend when Handler was starting out, and which he permitted to be sold as a stock image in lieu of payment. By the time anyone realised, the book was already printed, and it has appeared all over the world. Just another day in the weird world of Lemony Snicket.
We Are Pirates is published by Bloomsbury.
