What she says: I’m fine What she means: What time period does A Series of Unfortunate Events actually take place? There is mention of horse-drawn carriages, but also of motor cycles and automobiles, but the way the three Baudelaires dress is indicative of the nineteen hundred-something’s. Characters are dressed in both early twentieth century clothing as well as up to date clothing. There is mention of computers, fax, and phones but some things seem rather dated. What time in history is it??
I remember reading an interview with Lemony Snicket when I was a kid, where they basically asked him that exact question.
His answer was “the year of the Rat”.
when i watched the film i was extra confused because i thought they were Victorian but count olaf was drinking a slurpee so i just lost all sense of direction
I’ve wondered the same thing, and as a professional writer and editor, don’t know how he got away with it–like, how were his editors and publisher like, yeah, sure, okay
I actually really liked the little anachronisms of A Series of Unfortunate Events because it adds to the subtle absurdity and abstraction of the story space.
The whole narrative perfectly constructs this slightly ‘off’ world where three orphans can somehow be passed around the same group of (barely disguised) people from place to place, an infant child can become a gourmet cook before learning to form sentences, etc. In this world, evil is both carried out and vanquished by complete chance, or the intervention of deus ex machina that actually never feels out of place because of just how weird everything else is. Why wouldn’t a Scooby Doo-esque button be concealed in a village statue in a world where a man can burn a mansion down with a strategically placed mirror? Why not have a narrator define words at random, but only ever in a single context, if said narrator is also going to devote an entire page to the word ‘ever’?
It’s just the same with the date; the things that happen to the Baudelaire children are the product of a backwards world, and in their perennial adolescence they too seem to be a little unstuck in time. Count Olaf has an outdated title, but despite being anchored to this by his very name he floats between a frankly unmatched number of false identities. It’s just one of many characteristics of a series that does the absurd/unsettling exceptionally well at every level.
I like it too. It’s an “unreality.” It’s not that writers can’t do it and can’t do it well, it’s that I feel like a lot of them don’t actually get the permission to do it. And it’s awesome that this author got away with it.
There was an interview done with Lemony Snicket where he was asked where the story takes place, as opposed to when, and he said that the books take place in the world that you think exists when you're a child. Which makes So. Much. Sense. Of course bankers have seven phones and when they answer them they just say a string of numbers! And herpetologists naturally have huge collections of fantastic reptiles in their homes! Some of the absurdities of the adult characters went over my head when I first started reading these books as a 7-8 year old because I still lived in that world. It's an incredible way to create a setting for a kids book and I love it to pieces.
