I’m not
sure if this is a review or a fond stroll through literary memories. We’ll see what I end up with when it’s done. Though they’re children’s books, I didn’t start
the thirteen-part Lemony Snicket series until high school, and the last book
wasn’t published until I was in college.
I’ve since reread the entire series multiple times, and I enjoy it just
as much now as I did then.
A friend,
I remember, had recommended the series to me, so I borrowed The Bad Beginning from an English
teacher with plentiful bookshelves. I
was struck almost immediately by the sly playfulness of the prose; I quickly
realized that Snicket’s habit of conversationally defining words beyond the
reading level of his target demographic was more than just utilitarian. I laughed aloud when he cheekily defined a
simple word with a harder one, explaining that “faked” meant “feigned,” and
when he mentioned the only dish not
described as boiled in an unappetizing meal, he helpfully informed us that
“blanched” meant “boiled.”
There
were other writerly quirks, of course:
alliteration, allusions, and anagrams, delightfully non-sequitur
analogies, and, as I’ve said before, the fantastic conceit of translating
Sunny’s baby talk. I always loved the
way Snicket positioned himself as a character adjacent to the narrative, a
lugubrious investigator documenting the sad history of the Baudelaire orphans,
one constantly beset by shadowy foes and forced to arrange clandestine dead
drops with his editor and hide secret messages within his manuscripts. The books are littered with additional comic
gems, just because; I adored the random little Easter eggs, like Snicket’s
disdain for The Little Engine That Could or the way he sums up the moral of
World War I (don’t assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.)
Wonderful
absurdist humor aside, any youth series that opens on three kids losing their
parents and home in a senseless fire was never going to be merely a barrel of laughs.
The books don’t shy away from hard moments, real loss, and impossible
choices. Though the Baudelaires find at
least one kind adult in each book, I found it terribly sad that they could only
really rely on each other. All the grown-ups meant to protect them were
too naïve, too trusting, too afraid, too much of a pushover to help when they
needed it. (That’s largely why I love The Penultimate Peril, for the chapters
with the greatest Denouement.) As the
Baudelaires took care of themselves, they wrestled with important questions. If they did ignoble things to thwart
wickedness or stay alive, did it mean they were no better than the villians? And I remember sitting on my bed reading The Grim Grotto, tearing up as Snicket
compared a great sadness to a fire. He
said that, like smoke, your sadness spreads to everything in your life,
tainting even happy things with its ashen colors and scents. That one paragraph got to me more than any of
the deaths in Harry Potter.
Like I
said, I was in college with The End
was published; the day it came out, I ran out between classes to buy it. My old ritual of reading each book in a
single day was no longer viable – I was now insanely busy, and with the way
they’d lengthened over the years, The End
was more than twice as long as The Bad
Beginning. Still, I read during
every free moment and stayed up later than was strictly prudent, sitting on the
floor of my room reading. As ravenous as
I was for it, it was one of those books you dread finishing, because you know it’s
the last. As I closed the book on
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny and The End
made its parting gift to me, I took comfort in Snicket’s words that stories
don’t end when they stop being written.
The story goes on, and with this story, it’s nice to think of it living somewhere
behind the page.
No comments:
Post a Comment