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Book by Handler, Daniel
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About the Author:
From The Washington Post:
Daniel Handler has written three novels under his own name, including The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and Adverbs, and many books under the name Lemony Snicket, including All the Wrong Questions, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the picture book 13 Words.
In "Soundly," perhaps the most emotionally resonant of the 17 adverbially titled pieces that make up Daniel Handler's Adverbs, the narrator remembers what her driver's ed teacher once said a car horn should convey: "Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!" That teacher has inadvertently offered up the theme of this jigsaw puzzle of a book about lonely people stepping gingerly through the smoldering volcanic debris field of love.
Handler -- better known as Lemony Snicket, the author of the enormously popular kid-lit "Series of Unfortunate Events" -- has given his adult readers a lot to ponder as they flip over these pieces and work to put them together. Within an atmosphere of impending doom, characters step forward with their attendant baggage, introduce themselves and tell us why true love is so elusive.
And the author tells us things, too -- mostly what love is, metaphorically speaking. Love, apparently, is a lot of different things, from saltwater taffy to acts of Camelot-style chivalry. In a devastating piece called "Briefly," a man who accidentally kills a magpie while playing golf recalls the aching memory of a boyhood crush: "Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green."
Readers of Adverbs are asked to make a dizzying number of connections as they move through the process of putting it all together: Characters who appear early in the book return for reprise visits, or perhaps Handler has mischievously reused their names for totally unrelated characters. The author admits as much himself: "At the end of the novel, it's Joe who's in the taxi, falling in love with Andrea, although it might not be Andrea, or in any case it might not be the same Andrea, as Andrea is a very common name."
The connections -- both the obviously purposeful and the bizarrely tangential -- incorporate repeating story elements. Adverbs is teeming with comically named cocktails (Hong Kong Cobblers, Tipsy Mermaids), things avian (eggs, hummingbirds, lost parakeets and Yellow-billed magpies), along with numerous taxis, bars and diners, a ripped purse and a woman known as the "Snow Queen" who can freeze a man in his tracks with her "Cone of Frost." (Did Lemony just skate through?) When Adverbs works, it works brilliantly and poignantly, taking its ruminations on the complexity and fallibility of love to avian heights. In "Soundly," a dying woman and her friend negotiate a desperate turn of events in the twilight hours of their companionship. In "Naturally," a wrenching tale of loss and disappointment, a murdered man finds love after death only to lose it just as mundane folks do. Other pieces work less successfully, some coming off a little too linguistically cute and clever, or too oblique.
In the end, some readers will wonder why these pieces don't all come together in a satisfying way. But love is a messy thing. In truth, these stories tell us that love is best understood as neither a noun nor a verb. "The miracle is the adverbs," the narrator says in "Truly," "the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe." This bracing reality constitutes both the primary strength of Adverbs -- and its intrinsic flaw. The puzzle may never be completed because the pieces cannot all be there, and those that are, hardly ever connect the way we wish they would. But that is life and that is love.
Reviewed by Mark Dunn
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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- PublisherEcco Press
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0732282349
- ISBN 13 9780732282349
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages336
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Adverbs (Paperback)
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HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd, New South Wales
(2006)
ISBN 10: 0732282349
ISBN 13: 9780732282349
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. 'One of our most dazzling literary conjurers shuffles the deck of contemporary consciousness and desire. A thrilling feat of tragic magic.' - Michael Chabon Adverbs marks the return of Daniel Handler to adult fiction as he tackles life's most complicated and compelling noun: love. In a series of intersecting narratives that explore variations of that ineffable feeling, Handler crafts a moving and shifting story exploring the frustrating glory of this most troublesome of emotions. two friends, one dying and one lonely; an adolescent's first homosexual stirrings for his sister's boyfriend; a doomed, enormously inappropriate tryst between a taxi driver and his passenger; a high-school crush that falls painfully short of a movie projected on a grungy screen. Handler's characters experience love in all of its dark, triumphant, devastating and sneaky forms. In Adverbs, Daniel Handler reveals to us how the most universal of themes is also the most unknown. 'With Adverbs, Daniel Handler, who's always been a great stylist, goes ten steps further, to become something like an American Nabokov. He and the Russian man share a rapturous love of words, a quick and delicate wit, a lyrical elegance that makes every single sentence silly with pleasure. On a broader level, Adverbs describes adolescence, friendship and love with such freshness and power that you feel drunk and beaten up but still wanting to leave your own world and enter the one Handler's created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs. those who want their books to read like newspapers should read newspapers.' - Dave Eggers Two friends, one dying and one lonely; an adolescent's first homosexual stirrings for his sister's boyfriend, and a high school crush that falls painfully short of a movie projected on a grungy screen. A moving and shifting story, that explores this most troublesome of emotions, love. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780732282349
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