"A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance,"
writes Lemony Snicket, "particularly if the library is very tall and the
surrounding area has been flooded." Silly addendum aside, this must be
the way that Daniel Handler, the demented genius behind A Series of Unfortunate Events,
feels about libraries. While the characters in those tales of woe are
fun and their adventures are interesting, the best parts of those
narratives, for me at least, involve off-hand remarks that allude to the
annals of literature, history or science and convey a profound love of
language that begs to be shared. Despite the forbidding marketing
materials that have always accompanied the books, I suspect that Handler
must feel quite pleased knowing that books bearing the name of his
alter-ego can be found in libraries the world over.
Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
collects some of the wittiest and most useful of these asides, along
with, as the jacket promises, "selections from his unpublished papers
and remarks he has made at dinner parties and anarchist riots." Readers
are not exactly warmly welcomed into the book. The back cover bluntly
states, "Life is a turbulent journey, fraught with confusion, heartbreak
and inconvenience. This book will not help." Then again, from an author
who usually warns his audience to run screaming from his latest effort,
this is pretty mild, as is the warning - for those folks with a habit
of flipping to the last page of a book first - that "the quoting of an
aphorism... rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen."
As if to discourage readers encountering Snicket for the
first time through this book from picking up a volume of his famous
series due to the presence of a particularly amusing quote, none of the
advice comes with a citation. Having read all 13 of those books and
jotted down several of my favorite one-liners, I remain largely unsure
as to which ones I've read before and which merely seem like something
that would fit right in with A Series of Unfortunate Events. An exception to my uncertainty is the following, which appears in the final section of this book and page 102 of The Wide Window,
third in the series, which I know because it may be my favorite single
sentence in the entire series: "If you are allergic to a thing, it is
best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is
cats."
Perhaps to further downplay the connection between this
volume of wit and wisdom and his series, he refrains from dedicating
the book to his dearly departed Beatrice, to whom each of the volumes in
A Series of Unfortunate Events is dedicated. Curiously, though,
he does not dedicate the book to anyone at all, as if the enigmatic
object of his affections is the only one Lemony Snicket deems worthy of a
dedication.
Like each of the volumes in that series, Horseradish
is divided into 13 chapters, the subjects of which all are integrated
into the introduction, which relates a skewered story about a woman who
climbs a mountain in order to consult a wise man about the meaning of
life. The chapter titles include Home, Family, School, Work,
Entertainment, Literature, Travel, Emotional Health, Affairs of the
Heart, A Life of Mystery, The Mystery of Life, An Overall Feeling of
Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape No Matter What One Does and
Miscellaneous. Each of the title pages is set apart and features a
series of silhouettes of the photographed man weeping on the front
cover, a horseradish root slung over his shoulder, who may or may not be
Handler. The root and the handkerchief are absent in the silhouettes,
and in the last few sections, he comes across as a rather jolly fellow,
cheerfully resigned to his fate.
Most of the selections in
this nearly 200-page-long book are funny, and many actually manage to be
useful at the same time. They vary in length and font size, with those
consisting only of a few words presented in large print and lengthy
selections of several sentences in tiny print. Short or long, these
clever commentaries are sure to amuse and enlighten.
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