What I’m reading, what I’ve read, what I hope to read.
Those of you who were as curious as I about the Chinese versions of Harry Potter running unconstrained throughout the continent, rejoice! Apparently the editorial board of the NYT were as curious, and unlike you and I, they have the resources to summon up summaries and excerpts from the works mentioned in the original article.
Accio, sequels!
According to my Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows countdown widget, there are 9 hours, 12 minutes, and 30 seconds until we know all.
So this is my last chance to make my predictions. Here goes.
[note: I won’t be able even to put my hands on a copy of this book until Monday evening. Don’t be telling me things I don’t want to know.]
Snape is good. Of this there is no doubt. He loved Lily Evans truly, madly, deeply. I think he grew up with her (in the skanky neighborhood we see at the beginning of Half-Blood Prince, when Petunia says she overheard her sister and “that awful boy” talking about Azkaban, she didn’t mean James) and hated James Potter for stealing Lily’s affections. (The jury is out on whether Petunia had a crush on him pre-Hogwarts.) He helped Lily in potions class; Slughorn never knew it was not her talent that got her good marks. He overheard half the prophecy and dutifully reported it to Voldemort, but when it resulted in Lily’s death, he returned to Dumbledore and vowed to defeat the Dark Lord.
He will be instrumental in that defeat. It was his magic that saved Dumbledore’s life after Albus destroyed the Slytherin ring. He will have the knowledge and skill to undo whatever connection there is between Harry and Voldemort.
Because Harry is the Horcrux. Whether this means Harry must die in order to destroy Voldemort, I’m not sure. I rather think it does. I’m pretty sure Harry’s going to die, whether by his own hand or by sacrificing himself.
Dumbledore is dead. Although I’m not as sure of this today as I was yesterday. Jobie is hurtling through the other books in preparation for tomorrow, and last night he came in to read the scene in HBP where Harry, in the dorm room, tries out the HBP’s Levicorpus spell. It’s a nonverbal spell, and it results in Ron dangling upside down in mid-air.
When Snape hits Dumbledore with the Avadra Kedavra spell on the parapet, something very strange happens. There’s the burst of green light, but then Dumbledore flies up and over the edge of the parapet. This is not what Avadra Kedavra does: whenever we’ve seen it before, the victim simply collapses. (Or do they? What happens to Cedric in the graveyard?) Also, we know from Order of the Phoenix that Avadra Kedavra will not work if your heart isn’t in it.
So has JK left it open? On the one hand, it is entirely possible that Snape has spoken Avadra Kedavra while noverbally casting Levicorpus, gently sending Dumbledore over the side. He certainly appeared dead, but what is one of the first things Snape enthuses over in the very first Potions class in Sorcerer’s Stone? The Draught of Living Death. Hm.
On the other hand, Snape did make an Unbreakable Vow to fulfill Draco’s mission, which was to kill Dumbledore. (That’s another reason we know he’s good, because he made an Unbreakable Vow to the Order of the Phoenix.)
So while I still think Dumbledore is dead, I’m downgrading my certainty on that. Even if he is dead, there are plenty of opportunities for him to put in an appearance in the last book. Harry could go into his Pensieve, where Dumbledore could be aware of his presence and have a chat, at least about things that happened before his death. He could show up behind the Veil in the Department of Mysteries, which is where we’re thinking Harry and Voldemort are depicted on the cover of the American edition. He could show up in the Mirror of Erised.
Speaking of covers, the cover of the American special edition shows the gang riding on a dragon. Is Norbert returning? That would be classic JK, wouldn’t it?
Who’s dying? Can’t tell. I’m betting Hagrid for sure. Possibly Snape. Probably Harry. Maybe Draco.
Kreacher has the locket.
That’s all I know. The floor is now open for your crackpot ideas.
Happy birthday to me. In celebration, I only cleaned up the backyard. The bulk of the William Blake stuff, still in the basement, will have to wait until some other time.
I also read: Unspun, and part of Thinking in Circles, and now I’m delving back into Out of Our Minds. A quote from a research consultant has struck me. Speaking of the characteristics of a creative organization, David Liddle says:
“It is first and foremost a place that gives people freedom to take risks; second it is a place that allows people to discover and develop their own natural intelligence; third, it is a place where there are no ‘stupid’ questions and no ‘right’ answers; and fourth, it is a place that values irreverence, the lively, the dynamic, the surprising, the playful.”
Well, I think he just described the Lacuna workshop group. There were only six of us who were there week after week, Marc, Molly, Melissa, Laura, Carol Lee, and me, and I think we did an incredible job of creating the two pieces we staged from nothing. We all contributed, we all took off in different directions, we all built on what the others brought. We took essentially in each case a plotless poem and created a visual staging that I think intrigued and delighted our audience.
Since that was our goal, to surprise and delight our audience, we succeeded wildly. As usual, though, we succeeded beyond anything our audience could expect. It’s like the fact in biology that animals are hardwired to respond to stimuli that go beyond anything they encounter in nature, e.g., a certain butterfly will be attracted to a shade of blue that is brighter/more vivid than any potential mate he might encounter in the real world. Our audience may have been delighted, but there was actually more there to delight them than they were even aware. (Did I just get my analogies inside out?)
The kinds of things we invented, Toast Heads, Ice Sprites, dancing hedgehogs, puppet walls, snowdrifts that turn into banks of flowers, a troupe of traveling sunflowers, stained-glass tortoises pulled by an angel, are truly and totally wonderful. A more polished version of them all will only amaze an audience even further.
This richness is due entirely to the six creative minds who cobbled it all together (with thanks to the other minds who joined in from time to time: Mary Frances, Kevin, Galen.) This bodes extremely well for the workshopping of the entire show, if and when we begin that process.
As Carol Lee said at one point, “This is hard, so much harder than just buying a script and doing that.” But as she also pointed out, what an incredibly enriching experience!
83 days to go.
The only creativity in evidence today was a couple of notes I made in my notebook about some changes I want to make in some of the pieces I’ve already orchestrated.
Otherwise, I cleaned house and rearranged the kitchen cabinets.
I finished reading Miss Hickory, a Newbery Award winner from the 1940s. A very, very odd book. She’s a doll made with an apple twig for a body and a hickory nut for a head. Very hard-headed she is, a point made repeatedly by Squirrel. She normally lives in a corncob house near the Old House, but the family has up and gone to Boston for the school year, abandoning her.
Through the kindness of several animals (which she barely appreciates), she finds a new home in an old robin’s nest, and the rest of the book concerns itself with inching through the fall and winter months, observing all the animals and Miss Hickory’s interactions with them. She’s a stubborn busybody and not very likable.
Still, it is incredibly shocking when, in the spring, she is forced out of her nest by Robin’s return. Seeking shelter, she goes into what she thinks is Squirrel’s abandoned cleft at the base of the apple tree. He’s there, nearly starving, and after she chides him one too many times for being an idiot, he eats her head. And it keeps talking while he’s eating it!! It sums up her failings for her and finally gives her a taste of her own medicine.
Headless, she climbs back up the apple tree until she comes to a limb with a split in it. She sticks her neck into it, and that’s where the little human girl who abandoned her in the fall finds her, now part of the apple tree as a grafted scion.
Ewww. It’s one of the creepiest endings I’ve ever read.
I have just finished reading The Penultimate Peril, Book the Twelfth in A Series of Unfortunate Events by the inestimable Lemony Snicket. This is a completely subversive book.
First of all, there is no way this can be considered children’s literature. In tone, in style, and in philosophical underpinnings, this book is the equal of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I’m not joking. Snicket has extended his marvelously snarky Victorian narrator’s voice into something that is meta-post-modern wonderful, a word that here means “full of wonders.”
The basic “mirror” motif, the convoluted sentences, the convoluted plotting (which was always circular and inconclusive and in any case grinds to a halt, about which more in a moment), the moral uncertainty: by the time Snicket reaches the end of this, the longest of the books, it all has spiralled out of control and dissipates like the smoke of a building burning to the ground.
I was about to type “moral ambiguity,” but it occurs to me that morality in this book is not ambiguous. The cartoon-character versions of good and evil which have sustained the series still operate, but they are reflected back and forth in Snicket’s moral mirrors so often that we end up looking at multiple images, splintered and reassembled into scary chimeras of truth. The climactic sequence, absolutely thrilling in its breathless action, takes a while to register, but Violet, Klaus, and Sunny take action against the forces of evil in ways that are in themselves questionable, and there is one moment in the ultimate penultimate peril which is truly shocking. The children’s acceptance of a kind of Realpolitik is disturbing, but then again, dear reader, have we not spent the previous eleven books wishing they would just kick butt? And now, finally, they have.
I say “finally” because it is my belief that this is the end. I know Mr. Daniel Handler, Snicket’s spokesperson, has been quoted as saying the last book will come out in the fall of 2006, but I have reason to believe he’s lying. He has always hinted there would be thirteen books in the series, and there are: twelve in the history of the Baudelaires, and the Unauthorized Autobiography which came between Books Eight and Nine. The location of this book, the Hotel Denouement, is an in-joke, of course; the denouement of a play always comes at the end. Technically, as Snicket points out, the denouement is not the very end, but also technically, the denouement is the untying of the knots of the plot, which signally does not occur in this book. “Unravelling” would be a more apt translation in this case. Snicket throws out enough hints and clues and observations to lead us to a gorgeously complex denouement, but he does not do it. I believe he has chosen to leave all the loose ends loose.
The title of the book, Penultimate Peril, suggests that there is one more volume to come, but this book reads like a finale. The ambiguity of the Beaudelaires’ situation, of VFD, of Olaf and Snicket and all the rest, is reflected (!) in the ending, which at face value is just another cliffhanger, but which I believe is the final ending. Do we get answers? Do we get a happy ending? Do we get an unhappy ending? No, no, and no. And that’s Mr. Handler’s joke.
A brilliant book. I shall be very disappointed if there is another. Unless of course he does tie up all the loose ends. Bastard.