19 October, 2003
The Carnivorous Carnival, Lemony Snicket (286 pp, HC, 2002)
Long time, no read. It may look like I'm behind on my booklogging, but the reality is that I haven't had any time to read, lately. It took me about a week to read a Lemony Snicket book! Can you believe it?
In their latest adventure, the Baudelaire orphans once again find themselves in a dire situation. They're at Caligari Carnival, home of fortune-teller Madame Lulu. Lulu is the reason Count Olaf has been able to find the Baudelaires again and again. And, of course, Olaf and his crew are at the carnival as well, searching for the latest Baudelaire intel, and the location of the Snicket File. They disguise themselves as carnival freaks, and try to find out the information before Olaf does.
In this instalment, we learn a little bit more about the mysterious VFD organization to which the Baudelaire parents, Count Olaf, the Snicket brothers, and Madame Lulu herself once belonged, and (highlight for spoiler):
That one of the Baudelaire parents may still be alive! And, it seems that my hypothesis that Beatrice was the Baudelaire mother was incorrect, and that Mrs. Baudelaire was--probably--Lemony Snicket's sister.
Like the last book, it ends on a cliffhanger: one of the Baudelaires has been captured by Count Olaf, and the others are in dire straits. And, everybody is looking for VFD headquarters!
Of course, it wouldn't be a Lemony Snicket book without commentary on ethics, culture, and the human condition. Today's lesson is on Shakespeare:
There is another writer I knnow, who, like myself, is thought by a great deal of people to be dead. His name is William Shakespeare, and he has written four kinds of plays: comedies, romances, histories, and tragedies. Comedies, of course, are stories in which people tell jokes and trip over things, and romances are stories in which people fall in love and probably get married. Histories are retellings of things that actually happened, like my history of the Baudelaire orphans, and tragedies are stories that usually begin fairly happily and then steadily go downhill, until all of the characters are dead, wounded, or otherwise inconvenienced. It is usually not much fun to watch a tragedy, whether you are in the audience or one of the characters, and out of all Shakespeare's tragedies possibly the least fun example is King Lear, which tells the story of a king who goes mad while his daughters plot to murder one another and other people who are getting on their nerves. Toward the end of the play, one of William Shakespeare's characters remarks that "Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, like monsters of the deep," a sentence which here means "How sad it is that people end up hurting one another as if they were ferocious sea monsters," and when the character utters those unhappy words, the people in Shakespeare's audience often weep, or sigh, or remind themselves to see a comedy next time.
That last bit is exactly how I felt after watching King Lear both times I've seen it. (Both times for my high school English class, in which we did an intensive study of King Lear. I don't know why we couldn't do Hamlet or Macbeth, or another of the cool tragedies, instead.) They were good productions--one at the National Theatre in London, starring either Derek Jacobi or Ian McKlellan--but it is just one hell of a depressing play.