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Hello. I am Daniel Handler, the author of this book. Did you know that authors often write the summaries that appear on their book's dust jacket? You might want to think about that the next time you read something like, "A dazzling page-turner, this novel shows an internationally acclaimed storyteller at the height of his astonishing powers." Adverbs is a novel about love -- a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love. At the start of the novel, Andrea is in love with David -- or maybe it's Joe -- who instead falls in love with Peter in a taxi. 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. So is Allison, who is married to Adrian in the middle of the novel, although in the middle of the ocean she considers a fling with Keith and also with Steve, whom she meets in an automobile, unless it's not the same Allison who meets the Snow Queen in a casino, or the same Steve who meets Eddie in the middle of the forest. . . . It might sound confusing, but that's love, and as the author -- me -- says, "It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done." This novel is about people trying to find love in the ways it is done before the volcano erupts and the miracle ends. Yes, there's a volcano in the novel. In my opinion a volcano automatically makes a story more interesting.… (more)
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That sounds about right.
This book is not dissolute and confusing because it serves its theme. It
If he ever decides to put the work in, he'll probably write a good novel.
Quoth Handler "Yes, there's a volcano in the novel. In my opinion a volcano automatically makes a story more interesting." And there is a volcano in the
I'd like to provide a timeline and a list of characters but the story is so jambled it wouldn't make sense. The characters all reoccur during the novel but are so unmemorable you can't keep track of who's who. In addition, some seem to have mystical powers in what is otherwise, a realistic fiction type book.
The novel is supposed to be about love, different forms and presentations of it. However, if Handler's love is supposed to be real love it scares me. Most of his characters are stalkerish in quality and their love is very superficial. There are several divorces, break ups, hook ups and just plain fake love. At the end it seems several of the female characters are pregnant and possibly this means another type of love to the author.
Handler's writing style is very disjointed. I think he tries to be more flowery and "hip" with his writing than he needs to be. It jumps around so much that you just get lost and confused. The book, at 272 pages went on way too long for my tastes. If you like the odd and random type of book go ahead and read, otherwise I recommend spending your time on a better piece of literature.
But I digress...
The premise grabbed me, as advertised on the inside jacket. This is a collection of stories, all defined by the adverbial chapter heading, all about love, in one form or another: hetero, homo, platonic, unrequited, dying, dead, demented, or simply ignorant. (These are all adjectives, by the way, mine, not adverbs, not the chapter headings.) They are all told extremely well. The voice that Handler uses throughout is whimsical yet poignant. His unseen narrator is an intelligent guy with a sense of humor and a flair for irony. He can be funny one minute and heart wrenching the next, and he uses his humor to effectively avoid the sand trap of sentimentalism you can usually find in love stories such as these.
That his setting is the west coast, mostly San Francisco, where terrorists are about to strike (or recently have struck), and Seattle, where either a volcano has or is about to erupt, is both incidental and atmospheric, lending some intrigue to these stories that lies just outside your peripheral vision. Also, he overlaps characters, or at least character names. This leads to interesting questions. Is Allison from the first story the same Allison in the last? What about Joe? I'm pretty sure Gladys is always the Ice Queen, and Mike always seems to be Mike. This unconventional use of characters and names is jarring at first, but it forces you to focus on each story individually instead of trying too hard to find a link between them, even when numerous and obvious links exist.
So how does it fare using my typical criteria? As individual short stories, each one is rich in its own detail though not exactly original or inspired. Still I'll give him high marks for the collection on the whole. And I've already talked about the voice: excellent. And the writing, let me say, is surprisingly good. Why surprisingly? I guess I just wasn't expecting it, perhaps not from a guy who's primarily famous for children's books, but didn't I notice a spark of something brilliant there, too?
Let me make no bones about it: this may not be a book for everyone. The stories may be a little slim and, perhaps, littered with cliches, but the writing more than compensates. For some reason, this book inspires me to write again; I don't know if it's the wit or the wisdom inherent in these stories, it doesn't matter, because any time that happens, I'm a happy man.
Invisible Lizard's Unusual Oranges
The only good thing about this book is the cover, which is designed by the incomparable Daniel Clowes.
Each chapter is named for an adverb, which features obliquely in the story. The conceit is rather annoying. Many are fantastical, like the mock noir of the Snow Queen in a diner. Others are realistic, like the high school boy pining for his fellow movie theater usher. All meditate, a bit preachily, about the nature of love.
I found this book to be surprisingly moving and honest, at least when it comes to the way love can feel. There is a lot of dark humor and some suspension of reality is involved: a ten year old boy and the Snow Queen fall in love over frozen calimari, and San Francisco, as it turns out, was actually built on top of a volcano. Fans of Lemony Snicket will dig this.
It seems that many of the other reviewers disliked the short story style, and the lack of connection. However, if you don't sweat the details and simply enjoy the ride, this is a great book.
I haven’t yet read Handler’s earlier two ‘adult novels’ (that makes them sound like porn, but it is really just an annoying tag given to novels written by people who also write kid’s books), but Adverbs is an excellent novel. The prose is playful and fun, there is a lot of wordplay and humour, and colourful phrasing, but there is also a lot of heart. The characters are deftly portrayed and are brought fully to life. The book is a set of short stories each titled with an adverb and are about love in some form. The characters all move in and out of each other’s stories as they criss-cross the US and fall in and out of love. Though not all of the characters who have the same name are the same person. It would take a careful and exacting read to truly sort out who is who and who knows who and who loves or loved who. But each of the stories are well written and engaging. The characters are lively and fun, and also depressing or creepy, and often sad (how could you write a book about love without sadness?). But they are always real, and always compelling. There are a lot of pop culture in jokes strewn through the pages, and the book manages to be funny and serious at the same time. No mean feat these days. This is a great collection of stories that also reads as (and is indeed titled as) a novel. This is a rich, warm, funny, and all round excellent book. My stalking will continue. In fact I will see him again this week (finally in my home town) appearing in place of Lemony Snicket. No doubt he will not disappoint.
So after that preamble, you may be interested to hear that Handler has written some adult novels under his own name. You would also expect some off-beat humour and full-on quirkiness and Adverbs doesn’t disappoint.
The novel is really a series of short stories, mostly linked, sharing characters and a timeline. Each chapter is titled with an adverb, which occurs physically in the text or in character in that story, including: obviously, particularly, briefly, naturally and symbolically to name a few. Do you know the parlour game Adverbs? You have to act in the style of a particular adverb for the others to work out – well this book is a bit like that!
One of my favourite characters, Helena first crops up in the story Particularly in which she ends up working for her husband’s ex, teaching in a school …
"She and her husband needed to buy things pretty much on a regular basis. This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let’s face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position. Helena had been told it would last until the money ran out. From Helena’s experience, she would say the money was going to run out in about nine days.
‘It’s a temporary position, like I told you,’ said Andrea, who had said no such thing. ‘Pretty much what happens is, you facilitate the creative expression part. You’re a creative expression facilitator. Get it?’
Andrea was an ex-girlfriend of Helena’s husband, so she said ‘Get it?’ like one might say, ‘The same man has seen us both naked, and prefers you, bitch!’
‘Of course I get it,’ Helena said, but she sighed.Things like this had not happened to her in England. She could not explain the difference, perhaps it was because there wasn’t one. Certainly England had castles, but Helena had not lived in them, although memories of her British life had become more and more glamorous the longer she hung out at hideous places like this."
There’s a rich cast of characters who fall in and out of love, requited and unrequited, from a chivalric teenage crush to being immediately smitten with love at first sight. There are all kinds of love too, from full-on romantic to platonic, and ghostly too.
Despite being called Adverbs, Handler doesn’t use many of them – I gather that using too many adverbs is considered bad form for proper authors – Elmore Leonard says, ‘Using adverbs is a mortal sin’ in his slim tome 10 Rules of Writing.
Adverbs is also a strange book that happens to be full of magpies literally – it is obsessed with these colourful birds and their kleptomaniac character they crop up throughout as a kind of birdy glue – and dangle sentences at you like wonderful shiny jewels: "Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail."
How fabulous is that! Like all proper good metafiction, Handler partially narrates the story, and crops up as himself too. His narration is similarly knowing as that of his alter-ego Lemony Snicket, intimating that he knows what will really happen and he’s not letting on. As he is so much an integral part of the novel perhaps, the female characters tend to dominate the rest, but they’re all interesting so that’s not a bad thing.
It is also full of advice on life in general: "You have to be careful when you say what you like two weeks before your birthday. You say birds you’ll get birds. You say the new album by the Prowlers and you better not buy it yourself because it’ll be waiting for you in the bag from Zodiac records…"
There was much I really liked about this book. At the risk of sounding like Forrest Gump, it was a little like a box of chocolates – I liked some stories and characters far more than others. However, the quirk factor was right for me, and the literary tricksiness was right up my street, so I will look out for more by this interesting chap.
The audiobook is read by one of my favorite narrators, Oliver Wyman. I might have enjoyed it a lot less without Wyman's narration.
Passed along through BookCrossing