Across the Great Divide The first chapter concerns an unnamed apparently heterosexual male character Back Flips and Party Tricks I hated the first chapter of this novel, so much so that it took almost pages for me to recover and trust Daniel Handler.
Across the Great Divide The first chapter concerns an unnamed apparently heterosexual male character who leaves his partner, Andrea, catches a cab and immediately falls in love with the homophobic male cab driver, Peter. What prospects of success could this character or indeed, this novel have after an opening gambit like that? At First Sight Was Handler being homophobic? Certainly, there was no hint of homophobia in the rest of the book. So this novel provided me with a valuable lesson in my ongoing literary sex education.
Don't hurry the author. This early in a book, they might just be engaging in foreplay. Give them time. They might grow on you. You might get in the mood. You might like it. Sometimes, you can't judge a book by its lover. It consists of 17 chapters, each of which is headed by an adverb. Most of us are taught to eschew adverbs in writing. In Which the Author Proceeds Listily When He Could Have Proceeded Lustily Where are the adverbs you can get excited about, like these examples that I have chosen randomly you might have ones that are better or otherly : " Why did he choose such a neutral, neutered, sexless bunch of adverbs?
How did he plan to handle his subject matter? How did he plan to seduce us with such words? How did he plan to give us full body massages using these words as his hands? How could he tickle our fancy using these words as feathers? Or so I thought. Love Traversed Adverbally These words mean almost nothing by themselves. Without more, they are just adverbs. Step 2: Just add verbs.
Adverbs can't pleasure us alone. They need a verb to qualify. They need a word they can relate to. And the word is Love. Love Probed Facetiously Love is a diamond and each chapter explores a different facet through the eyes of different beholders.
There is some contention as to whether the book is really a novel or a collection of short stories. However, the chapters are not discrete in the sense that they have no relation to each other. Daniel Handler adds detail, chapter by chapter, so that meaning and understanding accumulate over the course of time, like a magpie assembles its nest, or photos add up to a photo album, or songs with similar themes add up to a concept album.
Characters, or at least names, from one chapter turn up in later chapters. We learn new things on the way, constantly revising our opinions and speculating about the destiny of the characters.
So there is a cumulative wisdom at work, which unites the chapters into a novel of sorts. Do You Believe in Miracles? Everybody in the novel strives for love. If we are lucky, love will touch and enliven us. If we do nothing, we die. It's a struggle of Sisyphusian proportions. Life is short, time conspires against us. We live on fault lines. There are catastrophes occurring all around us. We can also be distracted by petty troubles and worries, the detritus of past relationships that hang around to haunt us.
We are mad not to seek out and seize the opportunity for love while we can: "What are we thinking? A volcano could destroy this town tomorrow, or guys with guns. Or both. Each member of the ensemble cast departs from their past, probes around while looking for love, and arrives at their own different version of the destination they aspire to.
Hitching a Ride with a Cab Driver For each of us, there's a different way to find love. And how we go about it can influence our prospects of success. At first, I thought I detected a cruelty, a sourness, a bitterness that seemed to be working on a sublemonal level, the occasional lemony snicker. In retrospect, I think I was wrong. I rushed to judgment, when I should have been patient.
The characters are diverse, but Daniel Handler loves them and their quest for love equally. He locates his own bird tale in another bird's nest, he places his diamonds in another jeweller's setting.
He co-opts a whole world of fairy tales, fact and fiction into his own story. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.
And the Reader Nods, Agreeably The significance of the novel is not necessarily that they found love the verbs , or that love happened to Andrea and Joe the nouns , the significance is how it happened to them.
He proved his point attractively, artfully, and aggressively. By the end of the novel, I agreed with him. View all 29 comments. Three is too generous, because I'm mad - deeply mad - at you, Adverbs. You sucked away 17 days of my life for what? WHAT, I ask you? Some clever lines, repeating symbols, cutesy structure - but what the hell was this? A novel? View all 4 comments. Jul 01, Matt Buchholz rated it did not like it Recommends it for: people that laugh when they're told to. As is the case with Barenaked Ladies fans and people that think Jay Leno is funny, those that like this book will be judged harshly and possibly abandoned.
Mar 01, Amy rated it it was ok Recommends it for: Those who like don't mind not being able to follow everything. Shelves: bookclubbook. This book looks, at first, to be a series of short stories that are titled with adverbs - Particularly, Often, etc. A cute concept that sparks some curiosity. But it really gets going when you realize that all the characters are connected, but the stories are not chronological nor are narrations always comprehensible.
Sometimes Joe isn't Joe and Mike is called Mark but his name is something else, and there are 2 Andreas, or are there? A mental map is so not good enough. I would suggest writing d This book looks, at first, to be a series of short stories that are titled with adverbs - Particularly, Often, etc. I would suggest writing down EVERY name you come across as soon as you begin,and then draw the connection lines.
I really wish I had done that. The writing is interesting, especially when it's not straigtforward, and I often felt like the author was messing with our heads on purpose and getting a good laugh out of our attempts to decipher his intent.
The stories in themselves are enjoyable and focus on emotions, life and death, love, optimism, pessimism, cynicism, etc. If you have to be on top of the plot all the time, then this book might not be for you - you just have to be able to accept that it is not possible to understand everything all the time.
Maybe that's the whole point. View 2 comments. Oct 03, Brent Legault rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: old hardhats, young nuns. I've never read Handler's kid stuff but Adverbs did make me feel young again, if you don't mind that dust-smudged cliche. Not that I'm old even. And I certainly don't yearn for a lost childhood. Adverbs, the novel, or rather Adverbs: A Novel, made English over for me again, for the little while I was inside it.
I had that giddy feeling I remember from my toddling times after reading my first "grown-ups" book -- that is, my first book without pictures. I don't know what that book was but it doesn I've never read Handler's kid stuff but Adverbs did make me feel young again, if you don't mind that dust-smudged cliche. I don't know what that book was but it doesn't matter. It's the feeling that's important, that twang of wonder.
And I have to say with some chagrin, because it makes me sound sentimental or simply mental , but this book gave me the grins, like one of those drugs plucked from under forest ferns I haven't taken since high school. I felt like a fool while reading this book. The kind of fool that people point too and say: "That idiot must be the luckiest man alive. Shelves: merkins , novels. But Handler handles words like a panhandler panhandles handles, or a handler handles hands: deftly, with aplomb.
Like Watch Your Mouth , Handler uses recurring images, phrases, motifs, characters, spooling them through his stylish prose with its sardonic Sorrentino metacomment, its wily Nabokovian impatience, its Eggersian whimsy. View all 5 comments. Sep 17, Katie rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: the whole wide world. Shelves: fiction. David Handler is brilliant. This book compiles a bunch of stories involving characters who are intimately or barely connected to each other.
Each chapter is a short story but the characters become so intertwined that it feels like a novel. The theme of this book? Love, love, and more love. But it aint what you think. I listened to this on the way to work and found my self pulling every cliche and laughing at some moments, crying at others. Anyway, you'll never regret listening to these stories. If you're turning to this book as an escape from the pain you might be going through due to the loss of someone close to you, this may not be the book for you.
What begins as slightly edgy and somewhat derainged train-of-thought comedy turns into a very realistic and poignant portrayal of terminal illness. This book is much more than it first appears to be, but it was not what I needed and expected it to be.
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Stream or download thousands of included titles. There are all kinds of love too, from full-on romantic to platonic, and ghostly too. 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.
Like all proper good metafiction, Handler partially narrates the story, and crops up as himself too. 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. 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.
About the most self-conscious collection of stories one could hope to run across. What begins as playful literary hooliganism ends in a pseudo-masturbatory po-mo-rama. That said, it was rather enjoyable as those things go. It's okay, a little bit rambling and pompously awkward in places. I like the unique structure and the cleverly titled chapters.
There is one very touching story out of the many in this book. However, I found the Snicket books quirky in a darkly humorous but understandable way. The stories themselves are mostly oddly humorous, with the occasional pathos thrown in for good measure.
What had me confused was trying to figure out how, if at all, the stories were all connected. You see, Handler would often repeat names for characters over and over again, and it was hard to tell when this was the same Andrea, for instance, as a previous story or a brand new one. If it appeared to be the same character, it was hard to tell where this story fit in relation time-wise to the other story about the seemingly same character.
Overall, I enjoyed the quirky humor, but I would have preferred if there was one coherent story or a bunch of completely unconnected stories rather than the bizarre, possibly related string of stories presented.
At times the links seem a little forced and a little obvious. I was hoping that I'd like it - Daniel Handler is also known as Lemony Snicket, and it seemed promising. I didn't care about any of the characters, the reader is given no reason to invest in them emotionally, and he's got this weird thing about magpies.
The prose was pseudo-intellectual: at times it read like free-form poetry and I found myself wondering if it was just beyond my comprehension, but then I remembered that I'm really smart and I read A LOT and realized it's not me, it's that the book is badly written. Reading this book was like a hate fuck. I'm done, and now I'm burning it. Stupid fucking book. That sounds about right. This book is not dissolute and confusing because it serves its theme.
It is dissolute and confusing because Mr. Handler was too busy sorting through his filing cabinet of one-liners and prefab situational jokes to surround them with anything resembling a novelIf he ever decides to put the work in, he'll probably write a good novel. His style is quite different in his works as Handler than as Snicket, which was very stylized to begin with. To appreciate the book, you have to be willing to accept that there are a lot of characters and you will get the names confused.
You can go back and try to figure out who's who I made a chart but that isn't necessary. 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. This book lost me at first, and then gathered up steam in the middle, then tapered off a little at the end.
It's really interlocking stories - except that the characters are sometimes the same and sometimes not. Their history is sometimes the same and sometimes not. But it came full circle, in a way, at the end and wrapped up much more neatly than I expected.
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. Episodic at best, this really reads like a series of in jokes.
I felt that it suffered from characters and plot lines that may or may not have been continuous throughout the book. Still, it was amusing in some spots, but overall, I was kind of confused. From the looks of it, I think I am the only one who didn't fully enjoy this one. Daniel Handler rocks.
I am stalking him across the globe. He was fantastic on each occasion. 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. 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.
Adverbs Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Publisher New York : Ecco Collection inlibrary ; printdisabled ; internetarchivebooks ; delawarecountydistrictlibrary ; china ; americana Digitizing sponsor Internet Archive Contributor Internet Archive Language English. Immediately -- Obviously -- Arguably -- Particularly -- Briefly -- Soundly -- Frigidly -- Collectively -- Symbolically -- Clearly -- Naturally -- Wrongly -- Truly -- Not particularly -- Often -- Barely -- Judgmentally Two friends: one dying and one lonely; an adolescent's first homosexual stirrings for his sister's boyfriend; a doomed, enormously inappropriate tryst between a taxi driver and his passenger; a high- school crush that falls painfully short of a movie projected on a grungy screen.
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