What Happens?
Back at Aunt Josephine’s house, Klaus heads to the library to
investigate spelling and grammar in order to get to the bottom of Josephine’s
mystery letter. He discovers a hidden message; Curdled Cave. The wind starts to
get up and the children don’t have much time to find out where the cave is. They
locate Josephine’s books about Lake Lachrymose and identify the whereabouts of
Curdled Cave. Then the hurricane hits and causes the house to fall off the side
of the hill!
Thoughts as I read:
This chapter opens with a picture of poor Sunny suffering with her
peppermint allergy. She’s got raised bumps and a swollen tongue and the picture
is appropriately framed by a striped pattern which looks an awful lot like a
peppermint. I could almost imagine it being red and white.
Klaus’s tongue is all swollen and all he can say is Bluh bluh
bluh bluh bluh. I can’t help but be reminded of Ross in Friends in the
episode where he eats the pie that he’s allergic to and his tongue swells up.
Violet can’t understand a word that Klaus is saying, see this is where they need
Joey with his experience of his large-tongued uncle.
Even Sunny is having difficulty. She wants to say “Gans!” which
means “Good, because my hives are driving me crazy!” in response to Violet’s
proposal that the sisters take a baking soda bath to sooth the itch, but all she
can get out is “Bluh!” Meanwhile Klaus is to get on with his cunning plan to get
them out of the clutches of Captain Shah.
I’m impressed that feeling uncomfortable from an allergic
reactions he’s still able to think about their dire situation. My allergies
don’t cause a swollen tongue, but they do cause hives and that doesn’t make me
feel like doing much when my hands are all bumpy and itchy. I think it shows
what an awful problem this is going to be for them considering how yucky he must
feel with his poor swollen tongue.
Klaus heads to the library, a room without any glass in the
window, as if he’s not suffering enough already. The broken window caused damage
to some of the books which Snicket laments. Considering this is a book series, a
lot of bad things happen to books in it; we’ve had them burned and spoiled with
water so far. Poor books!
Klaus is conducting a little investigation into the Aunt
Josephine’s note with the help of three books Basic Rules of Grammar and
Punctuation, Handbook for Advanced Apostrophe Use, and The
Correct Spelling of Every English Word That Ever, Ever Existed. That last
one has got to be a big book! In fact, we’re told that each one is as big as a
watermelon.
After a REALLY long time Klaus finally reaches the
conclusion of his investigation, writes two words at the bottom of the note and
his sisters re-join him in the library. Klaus’s tongue is starting work properly
again now so he’s coming out with phrases like “Bluh, bluh take a baking soda
bluh?” which means that Violet is finally able to understand him at last. Even
Sunny is getting better now as well:
“Bluh?” Sunny shrieked, which probably meant “gluh?” which
mean something along the lines of “Why are you wasting valuable time studying
grammar?”
Klaus reveals that the note was not accidentally misspelled and
grammatically incorrect, they were in fact there for a reason; to conceal a
hidden message to the children. Which was quite a big risk to take really
because that relies on the ability of the children to figure out what the
message is. As he’s explaining this Sunny gives another “Bluh” meaning “Please
continue, Klaus.” So she’s not quite as well as Klaus is then.
Remember the note with all its mistakes. Well Klaus goes through
each error again, just to remind us of them; the wrong ‘its’, ‘Ike’ instead of
‘ice’, ‘inbearable’ instead of ‘unbearable’, and so on. As he rattles them all
off Sunny says “Coik!” which means “Thinking about all this is making me dizzy!”
or perhaps it’s the after effects of the peppermint, maybe Sunny’s the lucky
Baudelaire who gets hives and a swollen tongue with a side order of
dizziness.
All of these so-called mistakes point to one place: Curdled Cave.
And just in case you weren’t paying attention while they were spelling (heh) it
out, Klaus spells it out for us. Each letter in the name comes from one of the
miss-used letters in the letter. It’s quite a complicated message so you have to
give Josephine credit for coming up with it in the first place, and then
actually being able to use the letter to pass it along.
Obviously things can’t be that simple for the
Baudelaires. In an ideal world they would’ve been able to go to Curdled Cave or
sent someone there in their place. But there’s a hurricane on the way and it
chooses that moment to strike. They’re not exactly in the best position for this
right now considering the fact that they’re in a house perched on the side of a
cliff and the wind is blowing in through the broken window. As if the poor books
haven’t already suffered enough the hurricane starts wrecking havoc on them as
the children escape from the room. I hope their suffering is quick and
painless.
Next up, they need to find out information on where Curdled Cave
is. Violet guesses that it’s somewhere around Lake Lachrymose and that Josephine
hasn’t actually killed herself, she’s hiding out somewhere safe from Captain
Sham. That’s not the only thing in hiding; Ike’s books on Lake Lachrymose are
hidden away and now the children have to find them, and quickly too before the
house is blown off the cliff!
It’s been a while since we had some Unfortunate Events repetition.
The Baudelaires start to remember where they have hidden things that they didn’t
want to be found; Violet hid an automatic harmonica she invented, Klaus a book
on the Franco-Prussian war which was too difficult to read (again, giving a
little hint to when, or when it isn’t, set), Sunny thinks of piece of stone that
was too hard for her to bite. They all hid these things in the same place; under
the bed (or in Sunny’s case “Seeka yit”). So they head for Josephine’s room:
Normally it is not polite to go into somebody’s room without
knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to
be dead…
Well, that’s handy to know.
Josephine hides a lot of things under the bed, it’s a wonder that
the feet still touch the floor! She’s got scary pots and pans, ugly socks (I
like ugly socks, I’ve started knitting some which should be hideous), as well as
a photo of Ike whistling with his mouth full of crackers. And then they come
across some books: The Tides of Lake Lachrymose, The Bottom of Lake
Lachrymose, Lachrymose Trout, The History of the Damocles Dock
Region, Ivan Lachrymose – Lake Explorer, How Water Is
Made, and one that looks promising: A Lachrymose Atlas.
I love the names of things in this series. The books are nothing
compared to the names of the places surround Lake Lachrymose. After fretting
about how they’ll find one place in a book over four-hundred pages long and
thinking to use the index we’re treated to names such as Carp Cove, Chartreuse
Island, Cloudy Cliffs and Condiment Bay. I’d quite like to see a map of this
place to see some of the other places around the lake.
And they’ve got no choice but to walk down to Damocles Dock and
then sail across the lake to get to the cave. Quite a bit of walking that
they’re having to do here today. Never mind getting across the water in the
hurricane force storm. I’ve been on some rocky ferries before but really,
wouldn’t fancy that at all!
They don’t really have much choice about leaving anyway, because
one of the stilts supporting the house has been struck by lightning and has
rendered the house decidedly unsafe, as if it wasn’t before. Sunny has the right
idea here “Tafca!” meaning “We have to get out of here right now!”
They make their move but not quick enough. The house starts to
shake and everyone falls over:
Violet fell against one of the bedposts and banged her knee.
Klaus fell against the cold radiator and banged his foot. And Sunny fell into
the pile of tin cans and banged everything.
I love some of the turns of phrase in these books.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, or rather one page of the book
into a few sentences, the whole house lurches and the children make it to the
door and out of the house. Just in the nick of time because at that moment the
whole thing falls off the edge of the cliff and into the lake, luckily without
the children in it.
I have to admit, I was expecting this chapter to be longer than it
was because I was remembering the way that things happened in the film, where
all the things that Aunt Josephine was scared of (like exploding doorknobs)
actually happened. This chapter’s end came as a bit of a surprise to me. It’s
making me wonder how much of this book I’m actually remembering and how much I
think I remember but is actually the film.
It’s a double posting day for Chapter-by-Chapter tomorrow so we’ll
see then.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Let me know what you think. :-)