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Post by Dante on Nov 9, 2018 4:16:53 GMT -5
I wouldn't care to speculate. With Handler, you never know. But I've found no synopsis for the story yet, so we must continue to wait in suspense. At least the presence of foxes remains likely, if not necessarily literal ones.
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Post by Foxy on Nov 9, 2018 7:41:24 GMT -5
Yes, thank you for thinking of me Hermes ! Oh man, though, does that fox look like he has problems or what? The cover is a matchbox, possibly for lighting cigarettes, and he seems to have a drinking/spending problem and is missing a tooth. This may be a depressing read for me.
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Post by A comet crashing into Earth on Nov 9, 2018 7:57:14 GMT -5
The matchbox design reminds me very strongly of How To Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball - a book that caught my attention in the first place partly by looking very Snickety (and which also works with a bunch of the same themes as Snicket). It also makes me think of that edition of Fahrenheit 451 that you could actually light a match on.
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Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Nov 10, 2018 14:54:25 GMT -5
Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure Daniel Handler actually gave a shoutout to that Jesse Ball book on his Twitter when it came out
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Post by gothicarchiesfan on Nov 29, 2018 13:57:48 GMT -5
New description courtesy of Amazon: This is a story about two marriages. Or is it? It begins with a wedding, held in the small San Francisco forest of Bottle Grove--bestowed by a wealthy patron for the public good, back when people did such things. Here is a cross section of lives, a stretch of urban green where ritzy guests, lustful teenagers, drunken revelers, and forest creatures all wait for the sun to go down. The girl in the corner slugging vodka from a cough-syrup bottle is Padgett--shes keeping something secreted in the woods. The couple at the altar are the Nickels--the bride is emphatic about changing her name, as there is plenty about her old life she is ready to forget.
Set in San Francisco as the techboom is exploding, Bottle Grove is a sexy, skewering dark comedy about two unions--one forged of love and the other of greed--and about the forces that can drive couples together, into dependence, and then into sinister, even supernatural realms. Add one ominous shape-shifter to the mix, and you get a delightful and strange spectacle: a story of scheming and yearning and foibles and love and what we end up doing for it--and everyone has a secret. Looming over it all is the income disparity between San Francisco's tech community and . . . everyone else.
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Post by Dante on Nov 29, 2018 15:17:36 GMT -5
That sounds like the most Daniel Handleresque Daniel Handler novel in some years.
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Post by Foxy on Nov 30, 2018 9:17:20 GMT -5
Well, that's kind of depressing. I was hoping it was going to be about a fox with a drinking problem who turns his life around.
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coolcat667
Catastrophic Captain
Posts: 89
Likes: 16
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Post by coolcat667 on Jan 22, 2020 19:51:53 GMT -5
Did this ever release?
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jan 22, 2020 23:44:33 GMT -5
Yes, this book has already been released.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 15, 2020 5:59:50 GMT -5
Well, I said I would write a review of this, so I better had.
We are told at the beginning that it is a story of two marriages, 'or is it?'. As far as I can see it is, in fact, the story of two marriages. Bottle Grove is the name both of a piece of urban parkland in San Francisco (bequeathed by the Bottle family), and of a 'nearby' bar (actually a mile away, which I wouldn't call nearby, but no doubt standards differ). The story begins with the wedding of one of the couples, Rachel and Ben, in the park. At the wedding another character, Padgett, meets the barman, Martin, and becomes romantically attached to him, but does not in fact marry him; instead she marries a tech entrepreneur, Vic, in a plot devised by Martin, which does not work out perfectly. Various events follow.
Running through all this - and accounting for the cover, and the former title of 'Fox in the Bottle' - is a villainous character called Reynard, who appears to be possessed by the ghost of a fox which he knocked down with his car (though he was already called Reynard before that, so I may be missing something). Vic also has a story linking him to a fox, which may possibly be the mate of the fox killed by Reynard. Or perhaps the same fox, reincarnated. I'm not sure. There are numerous other fox references throughout the story, including a child called Kitsune (sometimes abbreviated to Kit!) and an institution called the Kitsune School.
The story does not really have what I would call a plot. Things happen, and then other things happen, and there are echoes between them. The ending point - the scattering of the ashes of Vic's first wife - seems arbitrary. It is a bit like a fragment of a soap opera. The DH book it reminds me of most is Adverbs, but in that the lack of an overall story was clear from the start (indeed one can argue that it has a bit more of an overall story than one was expecting), while here it is more a source of confusion.
The story is not told from any one character's point of view, but neither is it omniscient; it sounds more as if it were written by someone looking at these people's lives through a window, with their nose pressed against the glass.
The acknowledgements at the end refer to a lot of works to which the book is indebted, most of which I don't know; apart from Reynard the Fox, the only one I recognised is Rebecca. (One of the characters is called De Winter, though that is not revealed until near the end.) If I knew more of these works and could recognise the references, I might understand more. He also refers, very unhelpfully, to 'the pop album from which the novel gets its secret structure'. (There is a reference within the book to a jazz album, which I suspect relates to something real, but I don't know what.) I am worried that DH is allowing his love of allusion to consume him; you got something similar in WAP, with its hard-to-trace references to pirate literature, but there at least we knew what sort of source he had in mind.
I detected no other references to other works by DH, or, apart from the name 'Kit', to Snicket. I hope I have not scared him off doing this.
So - there are interesting things in it, and I think some opportunity for detective work, if you like that sort of thing (which Snicket fans typically do). But I'd say not a book to go out of your way for.
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Post by Dante on Jun 15, 2020 13:39:10 GMT -5
Hermes, I don't know if you intended your review to be a humourous one, but I wanted you to know that I derived a certain measure of amusement from it. You certainly make Bottle Grove sound rather like one for the enthusiasts, though; and this being not the first negative review I've read of it, I dare say I won't be boosting it to the top of my reading list any time soon. It's just not the right flavour of Handler weird that I enjoyed in his earlier novels.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 15, 2020 15:56:52 GMT -5
Well, I certainly meant to convey a tone of wry amusement. And I do think there is a sense of 'I am Daniel Handler: I write weird things' at work.
I also think he was trying to do too many things at once. It's about the nature of marriage, and about the tech scene in San Francisco, and about the possibility of supernatural intrusions into the world, and about folkloric traditions about foxes, and... all within quite a small space, and the things don't really come together. WAP similarly combined a lot of things, with pirates in the place of foxes, but they fitted together more effectively.
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