#0398

“It’s quite beautiful outside today. Why don’t we go into the city and get some anyways?”

Ahaha! Thank you for your encouragements. Brace yourself, @occono, because the story behind this is so snickety it hurts. For reference, here’s the article in question: (Link).

On March 2013, I interviewed Rose-Marie Vassallo (his official French translator) along with several of my colleagues from the “La Pente Glissante” French Snicket message board. I will translate a fragment of this interview (Link) for your convenience.

Rose-Marie Vassallo:Believe it or not, Daniel Handler’s agent had led us to believe [back in the early 2000′s] that he was completely unreachable! “Incommunidado”.

Snicket Sleuth:Oh, was that their infamous anti-marketing strategy?

Rose-Marie Vassallo:Exactly. There was so much scaremongering at the time… They were afraid we were going to disrupt his work, afraid we were going to leak spoilers. But long after that [2008, when she finally met him in person], Daniel Handler told me: “What? No! How long has this been going on? This isn’t true, of course I’ll answer your questions…” And it would have helped me, too, because as time passed, each new installment in the series felt doing crosswords. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with crossword puzzles, but sometimes, your first choice fits neatly with your later deductions… But at other times, your thirteenth vertical can be completely wrong and your entire grid becomes unsolvable. And yet it seemed so right at the time! I was so afraid of encountering this sort of conundrum with “A Series of Unfortunate Events”. And at times, I very nearly escaped disaster on certain plotpoints. I’ll admit: I’ve made mistakes!

So Daniel Handler’s marketing ploy (”don’t read these books!”) ended up harming the French translation in a spectacular boomerang effect. Now that’s comedy!

Retrieving the W never even crossed your mind. It's just a stupid magnet.