A couple of years ago, my son started reading the series, "A Series of Unfortunate Events". It is a tale of tragedy and woe, about the misadventures of three orphans whose parents die in the very beginning of the first book, when their home burns down. And it goes downhill from there. It will ultimately have 13 volumes, and now even a movie has been made loosely (very loosely) based on the first few books.
A lot of the things in these stories are almost as if they've been picked up from an alternate dimension - one in which our realities are waived a little bit, and the unbelievable becomes believable. The absurd becomes ordinary. If nothing else, it forces you to think "outside the box". The movie, although it does not strictly follow the storyline of the books, does a very fine job of capturing the essence of the otherworldness that is represented throughout.
In Book the Twelfth, The Penultimate Peril, I found myself laughing out loud at a couple of the things said. First time I've done that in a while.
Specifically, in this book, the oldest Baudelaire orphan, Violet, in disguise as a hotel concierge, gets called up to the roof of the hotel, where the sunbathing salon is located. I will quote a passage that won't give away the storyline:
"Ten sunbathers, their bare skin coated in thick, sticky, lotion, lay without moving on shiny mats arranged around a heated swimming pool, which was so warm that clouds of steam were floating up from the surface. In a corner was an attendant, his eyes covered in green sunglasses and his body covered in a long, baggy robe. He was holding two enormous spatulas, such as might be used to flip pancakes, and from time to time he would reach out with a spatula and flip over one of the sunbathers, so that their bellies and backs would be the same shade of brown."Maybe it's just me, but ... that's funny. In a silly-stupid sort of way.
2 comments:
Hello, I wondered onto your blog via Armadillo Creek. Anyhow, I find it interesting. I want to start reading this said "Series of Unfortunate Events" as soon as I'm done with C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia." I'm just about done with "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe."
Thanks! It's a fun series - a little childish at times, but then, that can be a good thing....
I wasn't too impressed with the movie (starring Jim Carrie) when it first came out, but in retrospect, and after having sat through it a few times on DVD, although they didn't even try at all to follow the books, it did an awesome job of capturing the essence of this "other" world.
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