It's
been more than six years since Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, concluded his enormously popular 13-volume young
adult series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Now Handler has revived the
Snicket narrator in his YA novel Who Could That Be at This Hour?
The
book is the first of a series — All the Wrong Questions — and a prequel to A
Series of Unfortunate Events. It tracks the young Snicket's adventures during
his apprenticeship at the V.F.D., a mysterious organization that readers
familiar with the Snicket stories will recognize.
While
the Unfortunate Events books play with ideas about gothic literature, All the
Wrong Questions explores detective-noir conventions. Handler tells Fresh Air's
Terry Gross that initially, he had concerns about writing in a noir style for
younger readers, not least because of the central role of the genre's femme
fatale characters and their sexualized personas. But then he had an epiphany
that freed him from this worry: In noir, he realized, the detective and the
femme fatale are doing the exact same thing.
"They're
both confined by their circumstances," he says, "and they're both
making their own moral path through a world that is sinister and secretive. ...
I think it's what draws them together, and also what makes them fight. ... You
could have a detective and a mysterious young girl who are birds of a feather
and who can't stand one another, and who are unapologetic about making their
way in a world that seems to have no place for them."
While
the genres and storylines may vary, the common denominator among the Snicket
books, says Handler, is a "proud Snicket tradition of a reassurance that
dark things are, in fact, there. ... That a terrible thing can happen at any
moment, and it is up to you to persevere through it." This is true, as
well, he says, of his new picture book and collaboration with illustrator Jon
Klassen for younger readers, The Dark.
Interview
Highlights
On
how the journey of a detective mirrors that of childhood
"An
outsider is trying to make his way in a mysteriously corrupt world, and ... all
instructions turn out to be false. ... All people turn out to have secrets that
are hidden, and ... the detective tries to find his own moral stance and own
path through that environment. And that seemed to me to also be like the
journey of childhood."
On
using sophisticated vocabulary in his books
"[C]ertainly
when the 12th volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events came out, which was
called The Penultimate Peril, I found that there were people who knew what that
word ['penultimate'] meant and people who didn't, but that that line was not
along age lines at all. I remember there was an article in a newspaper that
said, 'It's the penultimate book from the penultimate author.' They were just
sort of using the word as some kind of placeholder, whereas children learned
quickly what it meant and were quicker to adopt it.
Daniel
Handler Plays the
Accordion
The
Carioca
Queue
Count
Olaf
Queue
"You
see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it's often because once
you reach a certain age you're kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you
don't know what it means. And then you just start using it however it feels
right. ... I think children are less embarrassed to go look up the truth."
On
how Peter and the Wolf inspired Handler's new opera with composer Nathaniel
Stookey
"I
was asked to narrate ... a performance of Peter and the Wolf, and the music is
beautiful, and the story is insipid. And so I said to Mr. Stookey [my
collaborator on the project], 'Why don't we do something that could actually
introduce the instruments to young people, but isn't as really a boring a story
as Peter and the Wolf?' And so from that The Composer Is Dead was born. ...
[E]ach section of the orchestra demonstrates its sonic color and is also
interrogated. It's a mystery — the composer is dead [literally] — and so we
like to say it's like Peter and the Wolf meets an episode of Law and
Order."
On
his formative experiences with classical music
Related
NPR Stories
Lemony
Snicket's Musical Murder Mystery March 10, 2009
Lemony
Snicket Reaches 'The End' Oct. 13, 2006
The
Real Lemony Snicket Dec. 16, 2004
"My
parents met at the opera, met at a performance of the opera. They were both in
the audience. And classical music was the only music that I heard for many,
many years. ... And then I was also a member of the San Francisco Boys Chorus
growing up, which performed with the opera and with the symphony and all sorts
of classical opportunities. I had a very, very strict and traditional musical
upbringing, and then I had puberty, which wrecked my career as a boy soprano.
My parents like to say they considered castration in order that I could
continue to be a soprano, but in the long run having secondary sex
characteristics has really paid off for me, so I don't regret it."
On
what scared him as a child
"Everything.
Tall trees. People in tall trees climbing up to the top of them and leaping
upon my window. That was a large source of concern for me. Kidnapping. I
remember when my mother finally explained to me that it would be extremely
unlikely that I would get kidnapped because they didn't have any money, that
kidnappers were after money. ... I wish that had been explained to me years
previously. She said, 'You know ... we couldn't possibly pay ransom for you
that would be rewarding for a kidnapper, so you probably won't be snatched up.'
That was of intense relief."
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