The Unfortunate Events author on getting nightmares from Dr Seuss, Raymond Chandler’s brawny wit and the ghost story he read to tatters
I have a blur of a memory of sounding out the words to Dr Seuss’s The Pale Green Pants – “Then I was deep within the woods / When, suddenly, I spied them. / I saw a pair of pale green pants / With nobody inside them!”while my mother helped me along. The clearer memory is of seeing my trousers draped over a chair in my bedroom, and wondering, half-scared and half-hoping, if they were going to rise in the air while I slept – my first literary nightmare.
I was very small, and found a copy of Dino Buzzati’s obscure classic The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, a book with adventure, betrayal, a sea monster, an unreliable narrator, fascinating but inaccurate illustrations and a melodramatic heartbreaker of an ending. Whatever it all was, I wanted in.In college I was introduced to The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon as a classic of Japanese literature, a surefire recipe for me to assume it was boring. Now it is one of my favourites.
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