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  • Dahl, Gorey and Nabokov named as Snicket influences

    • Dahl, Gorey and Nabokov named as Snicket influences

    Date: 08/02/2010
    Daniel Handler has revealed the main influences on his literary alter-ego Lemony Snicket include British children's writer Roald Dahl.

    The author told the Daily Telegraph that elements of his Series of Unfortunate Events can be traced back to leading lights of the children's fiction genre.

    'Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey were enormous for me as a child and when I started doing this, I definitely kept them in mind,' he explained.

    Handler was also influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, of whom he is a great fan, and used some of the techniques favoured by the Russian author in his own work.

    '[Snicket is] an unreliable narrator, he's distracted by detail and digression until detail and digression become the point of the thing,' the writer told the newspaper.

    Despite linking the Series of Unfortunate Events books to literary greats, Handler admitted that he is still affected by self-doubt, explaining that he is worried about his six-year-old son reading them - in case he finds them boring.

    Last year, Handler confirmed that he will publish a new four-book series for teenagers under the Lemony Snicket moniker and write a young adult novel under his own name.
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