1st Floor Show me where

FICTION/Handler, Daniel
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Subjects
Published
New York : Ecco 2006.
Language
English
Main Author
Daniel Handler (-)
Edition
First Ecco edition
Physical Description
272 pages
ISBN
9780060724412
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Handler, best known for the darkly comic Series of Unfortunate Events novels (written under the Lemony Snicket pseudonym), returns to adult fiction with these witty--but ultimately wearying--ruminations on the precarious state of love. The 16 intersecting stories (each headed by an adverb modifying the noun love) display a cadre of couplings: gay, straight, platonic, perverse. In Obviously, a love-struck movie usher is chagrined to discover that life doesn't imitate art. In Symbolically, a narcissistic writer ponders the global impact of his novelistic debut. Although Handler's visions are often apocalyptic (San Francisco residents fret over a subterranean volcano about to erupt), in rare moments, he waxes both wistful and wise. Soundly reveals the bond between a woman and her dying childhood friend: She and I were cut from the same cloth, an angry odd quilt. Whether catering to kids or adults, Handler's humor is decidedly offbeat. Frigidly features an eccentric older woman known as Snow Queen and cocktails with names like Suffering Bastard and Neptune Fizz. Handler can certainly turn a phrase, but his prose is so overloaded with linguistic acrobatics--wordplay, repetitive narrative, and stream of consciousness, to name three--it's likely to leave some readers a bit bent out of shape, especially if they were expecting Lemony Snicket for grown-ups. --Allison Block Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The qualities that draw millions to Lemony Snicket-absurdity, wicked humor, a love of wordplay-get adulterated in this elegant exploration of love. Handler brings linguistic pyrotechnics to a set of encounters: gay, straight, platonic and all degrees of dysfunctional. Amid the deadpan ("Character description: Appropriately tall. Could dress better.") and the exhausting ("Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.") are moments of blithe poignancy: quoth a lone golfer, "Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green." In "Obviously," a teenage boy pines for his co-worker at the multiplex while they both tear tickets for Kickass: The Movie. In "Briefly," the narrator, now married, recounts being 14 and infatuated with his big sister's boyfriend, Keith. "Truly" begins "This part's true," and features a character named Daniel Handler, who has an exchange about miracles with a novelist named Paula Sharp. Handler began his career with the coming-of-age novel The Basic Eight; this lovely, lilting book is a kind of After School Special for adults that dramatizes love's cross-purposes with panache: "Surely somebody will arrive, in a taxi perhaps, attractively, artfully, aggressively, or any other way it is done." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Is romance "A Series of Unfortunate Events"? Ask Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, who here returns to adult fiction with criss-crossing tales of star-crossed love. With a seven-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The author of the popular Lemony Snicket series of children's books puts a playful spin on adult themes of love and lust, showing a narrative ingenuity that should delight readers interested in exploring the possibilities of fiction. The third non-Lemony book from Handler (after Watch Your Mouth, 2000) finds him challenging conventional categories. This initially appears to be a selection of short stories, even parables, with each of the 16 taking a different adverb as its title ("Immediately," "Arguably," "Symbolically" and, as a change of pace, "Often"). Teachers generally instruct fledgling writers to eliminate adverbs whenever possible (only passive verbs suffer from greater linguistic disrepute), yet Handler makes his strategy succeed, frequently putting the titular adverb at the service of a broader theme. In "Obviously," he examines the essence of "kissassedness." "Briefly" is the briefest piece here, and includes the pivotal appearance of a boy's briefs. "Soundly" culminates in a boat ferrying across a sound. And so on. Yet in almost subliminal fashion, the author encourages the reader to make connections between the stories, with the repetition of recurring motifs involving magpies and money, plot lines that seem to leapfrog from pieces at the beginning to ones toward the end and the reappearance of characters (who may actually be different characters with the same name). Even the narrative "I" is suspect--sometimes a man, sometimes a woman. Some might find the key to the narrative strategy in "Truly," which the author characterizes as an "essay" and in which he purports to drop the fictional pretense in favor of straightforward autobiography and explanation of authorial intent. Or is this just another twist of the metafictional maze? Whether one approaches this as a novel (in the loosest sense) or a series of somehow connected stories, Handler's prose is warm, funny, smart and addictively readable. It might even send some adult readers to Lemony Snicket to see what they've been missing. Experimental fiction is rarely this emotionally engaging. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Adverbs A Novel Chapter One Immediately Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner. We breathed it in, particularly me: the air was also full of smells and birds, but it was the love, I was sure, that was tumbling down to my lungs, the heart's neighbors and confidants. Andrea was tall and angry. I was a little bit shorter. She smoked cigarettes. I worked in a store that sold things. We always walked to this same corner, Thirty -- seventh and what's -- it, Third Avenue, in New York, because it was easier to get a cab there, the entire time we were in love. "You must be nervous," she said when we'd walked about two puffs. "Yes," I said. "I am nervous. I've never been to a reading of a will. I didn't even know they still did things like this, read wills. I thought it was, I don't know, a movie thing. In a movie. Do you think everybody will be dressed up?" "Who cares?" Andrea said. She threw down her cigarette and ground it out with the heel of her shoe like a new kind of halfhearted dance. "Look," she said, and shaded her eyes with her hand for a minute like she was actually looking at something. I turned my head to see. "I just mean, look ," she said, cupping my head with her hand. "The expression I mean. Look , I'm trying to be nice, but I'm scatterbrained right now, if you know what I mean. I'm frightened by your behavior. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and I said good morning, what do you feel like doing today and you said well I sort of have to do this thing and I said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will and I said what are you talking about and then you told me your dad died. This morning. I mean, he died two weeks ago but that's when you told me. That's when you told me. I'm trying to think that you just must be in shock that your dad died but it's very, very, very, very, very, very difficult." "He's not really," I said, "my dad." Three cars went by. "What do you mean?" she asked. "What are you talking about? What could you possibly mean? He is your biological father and raised you, along with your mother, in the same house, for eighteen years. He carves the turkey at Thanksgiving and when I met him three years ago I said it's so nice to meet your father and he didn't even blink. How can you say that? What can you mean?" "I don't know," I said, and we reached the corner. The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn't a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely -- been -- touched ear of corn. I put my hand up and one stopped. I opened the back door and Andrea just looked at me. I put one knee into the cab, half -- sitting in it, almost kneeling as if the cabdriver, whom you'll meet in a minute, had just brought me up curbside to ask this tall angry woman to marry me. She wasn't going to say yes, I realized. She was never going to say yes. "Why are you acting this way?" she said. "You've never acted this way. Usually you're, I don't know. Usually we're eating at diners and taking money out of our ATM machines, a normal person. What is-" "You don't have a chance," I said, "to act like this in a diner." "Please stop," she said. She smeared one finger underneath her eye, although she wasn't crying, just finishing a finger painting of herself. She was done. "This is worse than the last time," she said. "I think I should go to this thing by myself," I said, and sat more. "I think you should go home to the middle of the block and I'll go someplace in this cab. I'll be back later or something." "What do you-" She stood on the corner and wiped her eye again but now she was crying. Somehow she was crying by the time we reached the same corner and were almost all the way into a cab. "I'm going," I said, and shut the door. She stared at me through the window like I was maybe nothing. The cabdriver asked me where I wanted to go and I told him Seventy -- ninth Street and then I apologized for making him wait like that at the corner and told him I would give him an extra couple of bucks or something. "Don't worry about it," he said, and looked at me in the rearview mirror, a polite smile. His eyes veered off my reflection and onto the reflection of the traffic behind us, so we could merge, and we merged, and that's when, immediately, I fell in love with my cabdriver. "I changed my mind," I told him. Then I decided I shouldn't tell him, not yet. His cab number was 6J108. His first name was Peter, I saw, and his last name looked like somebody had just dropped their forearm onto the typewriter keyboard, someplace in Europe I guess. "Penn Station. I have to go somewhere." I felt the weight of the lie I had told Andrea, enormous and undeserved, and vowed I'd never do something like that again. But not telling Peter everything that was in my heart wasn't a lie, right? That was just good timing. That was just being sensitive. "I don't have to go somewhere," I said, "not really. But I think I should go somewhere." "Okay," he said. It didn't make a difference to him, and I loved him all the more for it. We turned left. "You have pretty eyes," I said. "Yeah," Peter said. "It's pretty nice. Since they cleaned it up." Adverbs A Novel . Copyright © by Daniel Handler. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Adverbs by Daniel Handler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.