Bewilderment for Brunch

Title: Poison of Breakfast

Author: Lemony Snicket

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation

Length: 154 pages

Rating: ★★★★★

In the years since this publishing house was founded, we have worked with an array of wonderous authors who have brought illuminating clarity to our bewildering world. Now, instead, we bring you Lemony Snicket.

Over the course of his long and suspicious career, Mr. Snicket has investigated many things, including villainy, treachery, conspiracy, ennui, and various suspicious fires. In this book, he is investigating his own death.

Poison for Breakfast is a different sort of book than others we have published, and from others you may have read. It is different from other books Mr. Snicket has written.

This review, a word which here means a long-winded list of my opinions and observations, covers one of my favorite authors of all time, Lemony Snicket. I first encountered Mr. Snicket’s work by accident when searching my local library for a happy book to read. Instead, what I happened upon was A Series of Unfortunate Events. My views on writing have never been the same. The last book in that series was published in 2006, and the last book Snicket wrote was published in 2014. That is to say, before this --his true last book written--which was published in 2021, much to my delighted surprise; a phrase which here means utter shock and slight suspicion.

Poison for Breakfast is a philosophical, pseudo-creative non-fiction book that follows the inner workings of Snicket’s brain during one particular day. It is introspective and inspiring–brilliant and bewildering–in all the best ways. I almost feel at times like he took my own thought process and dumped it out on the page but with his particular Lemony Snicket-y flair.

Language Apparent

If you have never read a book by Lemony Snicket, I envy you. If I could forget all about his books and have the chance to experience his writing style for the first time all over again, I would take the memory serum in a heartbeat. Never in my 23 years or hundred of books have I read anything that mimics or matches the specific phrasing, structure, and tone that Snicket uses. Most of this stems from his narrative style. All of Snicket’s books rely heavily on the narrator who is both an outside observer and an active participant in the story. The narrator knows all. He knows more than you, the reader, more than any of the characters, sometimes more than the author himself. He might know all, but he is not always correct. Having an omnipotent yet unreliable narrator creates unique chances to subvert expectations. You may think you know the truth of what is going on, only to find out that the narrator has twisted the facts. There is always a story happening underneath the story you’re reading.

Snicket accomplishes this with incredible ease. In the introduction to this review, I mimicked my favorite tactic he uses. By overexplaining certain words and phrases using “which here means”, he actually confuses or redirects the original interpretation. This allows him to have a chokehold over how the reader reads the story. It also gives him complete control over tone with very little wiggle room for alternative understandings. Having this kind of grip on the consumption of his work is a feat that many authors do not or chose not to accomplish. You can try and let your mind wander down absurdist avenues, but Snicket will always draw you back in.

Philosophy, Disguised as Mystery

In this book, plot is secondary. Even though there is a through line from beginning to end, it is only there as the two meeting beams that hold the masterful spider web. The framework of the story is that Snicket believes somehow his breakfast was poisoned and he goes to investigate the source of each item he has for breakfast:

Tea

With honey,

A piece of toast,

With cheese,

One sliced pear,

And one egg perfectly prepared.

(Written just like that over and over again.) Each chapter covers one line of the breakfast poem, but really they dive into different aspects of Snicket’s life, worries, and internal existential crises. The thoughts he is conveying unravel through the book like a ball of yarn that escaped off the couch that you are trying to pull back up by the single thread you still have hold of; in other words, quickly and without pause. These deep dives into Snicket’s consciousness are what the story is really about, not the possibility of him having been poisoned. That is just the catalyst for him thinking deeper, believing he is on the verge of death.

I am normally not a philosophy book reader, but I should have known that when written by Lemony Snicket I would devour it within hours of starting.

Honorable Mentions

Lines, paragraphs, and whole chapters of this book make my brain buzz in a very happy way. Here are my favorites.

“It’s the sort of book that’s so terrific you are almost sorry when you first finish it, because you will never get to read it for the first time again” (33-34).

Chapter 6: this is my favorite chapter.

“Happiness, in my experience, is like a bowl of bananas, because if you pay too much attention, it gets gobbled away, but if you forget all about it, either a robber steals it or it ends up rotten mush. It can be tricky to keep one’s happiness intact” (87).

Chapter 8: no, this is my favorite chapter.

“The man looked at me and his smile got sunnier, and then he said one of my favorite words in the world. It is a word that comes from Latin, an ancient language nobody speaks anymore unless they are trying to show off, which means someone translated it, long ago, so that I could have this word in my life. It is a little difficult to say why this word is so important to me. It is just a word for books and writing, but it is a word which conveys respect and admiration and hope. The respect is for the words themselves and the power that even a simple word—the word “poison” for example—can carry. The admiration is for how the authors put words together, in books you love the most. And the hope is that these sorts of words and these sorts of authors will continue to be read as time goes by. They will not always be the same words and the same authors, but they will stay with us, we hope, the way the meadow will have different goats, and the tree will have different fruit on its branches, but the park will still be there and people will still be there to see it. When you say the word, you are giving books and writing all this respect and admiration and hope, and so it is like calling your favorite books by a special name. It is a word that raises books and writing closer to the sky, and it raises all of us that way just to say it. It was almost a shame, I thought, that this wasn’t the moment of my death, because if there had to be a word that was my last—and there did, either right then or some other time—it wasn’t a bad one.

‘Literature,’ is what he said.

‘Literature,’ I repeated” (109-110).

And then there is the notes section. Amazing.

I honestly cannot recommend you read this book enough. Whether you are a philosophy fan, a mystery fan, or a Lemony Snicket fan, this is the book for you. It is one of those books that creates a before and an after in your life. Read it. Absorb it. Then come and let me know your thoughts.

Until then,

Keep wondering and stay wandering.