Children thrill to Lemony Snicket's nasty surprises

Life, as Snicket sees it, is "a series of unfortunate events." And in his ghoulishly funny children's novels, which in a scant two years have become a phenomenon to rival J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, these events are presented in a gothic panache that children seem to love.

"Dark things are just more interesting to me,'' Snicket, also known as San Francisco author Daniel Handler, said in an interview. "I had thought these books would be kept out of children's hands, but that has not been the case.''

No indeed. More than a million Snicket books have been printed since 1999 when his harried heroes, the ill-fated Baudelaire children, made their debut in the appropriately named "The Bad Beginning''.

The Baude-laires — Violet, Klaus and baby Sunny — have lives that no child would envy.

Their mansion burns down in the very first pages of the very first book, killing their parents, and the bereft children are packed off to live with Count Olaf, a venal trickster and distant relative who harbours designs on their inheritance.

They thwart his plot, barely, only to find themselves lurching from crisis to catastrophe. Adults, for the most part, are out to get them and nature is no ally, buffeting them with an almost biblical series of tribulations ranging from man-eating leeches to horribly itchy clothing.

The Baudelaires' harrowing — if hilarious — saga has taken them through seven books so far, including the "The Reptile Room," "The Miserable Mill" and the most recent, "The Vile Village". Their torment is due to continue with the next installment, "The Hostile Hospital," due out some time in early 2002, according to publisher HarperCollins.

Throughout, the children maintain a stoic sense of purpose, doggedly searching for a way out of a story that, Snicket promises, will have no happy endings.

GOTH FOR TOTS

Handler says he fell into the Snicket game almost by accident. An English major in college, he wrote a novel for adults, "The Basic Eight," billed as a high school murder comedy, and his publisher suggested that he try his hand at children's literature.

The result was the first of the Snicket oeuvre, a dark departure from what Handler, 31, saw as a depressingly sunny view of life delivered by most children's books.

"The books that frustrated me as a child were the ones in which good people only did good things, and were rewarded, while bad people did bad things and were punished,'' he said.

"In my own life I saw that being rewarded or punished had little to do with the quality of deeds that I was performing. It's a whole moral universe that most children's literature inscribes, and if you are a child and feeling powerless that sort of literature can be very frustrating.''

While he does claim a handful of literary fellow travellers — Roald Dahl, the author of "James and Giant Peach," among them — his artistic spirit is closest to that of Edward Gorey, whose bleak little books and sinister illustrations helped to define American Gothic for a whole generation of adults.

The Snicket books feature more than a bit of Gorey's Gothic glimmer. With their elegant bindings and subtle pencil illustrations, the books look like they were pulled from the dusty shelves of a Victorianchild's library.

Inside, each volume begins with a dedication to "Beatrice" — who apparently has long since met an unfortunate end. ''Beatrice — darling, dearest, dead,'' reads the first.

'SCREAM AND RUN AWAY'

The Snicket books are also peppered with literary and cultural references that would seem to appeal more to parents than their children. Characters sport literary names ranging from a banker named Poe to the Baudelaires themselves — a tip of the hat to 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose 1857 collection "The Flowers of Evil" reveled in visions of decadence and decay.

"I wanted these stories to take place in the world of books,'' Handler said. "I do hope the other shoe will drop with the Baudelaire name for some of my readers in ten years time."

One of his most intriguing inventions has been the character of Lemony Snicket himself — a tortured scribe whose tribulations are followed with horrified glee by his underage readership. Photographed only from behind, Snicket takes form through a brief biography provided on his Web site.

An exile, a hermit and a nomad, Snicket "was born before you were and is likely to die before you as well," readers are told. At signings in bookstores, Handler appears as Snicket's representative, telling his goggle-eyed audience the author is indisposed, having been bitten by a bug in the armpit.

Then he regales the crowd with pointers on how to get through life's varied pitfalls, summing it all up with the song ''Scream and Run Away''.

The Snicket books have been translated into languages ranging from French to Icelandic and optioned by Nickelodeon for a possible film or televisionseries.

And with six volumes left to go in the 13-part series, the Baudelaires clearly have plenty of awful adventures ahead of them. Handler declines to say how the series will end, saying only that the Baudelaires will get what is coming to them.

"Remember, happy is a comparative term,'' he said. ``I have an ending in mind — and it certainly could be worse.'' 

-Andrew Quinn

Happy bendings

Oscar-winning beauty Gwyneth Paltrow is the latest big name to come to grips with the ancient art after close pal Madonna sang its praises.

Now Gwyneth finds it the perfect way to chill out after a day of Hollywood cut and thrust. Other celebs who have discovered yoga's amazing healing powers include Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Barbra Streisand.

Some use the technique to add zip in the bedroom. Former L.A. Law stars Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker say their 26 year marriage has never been more exciting now that they use tantric sex, a yoga discipline that puts the woman's enjoyment first.

Rocker Sting and wife Trudie Styler couldn't agree more. He says: "I used to have sex like Lurch from the Addams Family, but now I think only of my wife's pleasure."

The craze has moved beyond Tinseltown, with an estimated 15 million Americans now including yoga in their daily routine.

Other stars who credit the Eastern exercise regimen with bringing new meaning to their lives include:

* X-Files David Duchovny, who practises yoga regularly.

* Sabrina the Teenage Witch stars Melissa Joan Hart and Soleil Moon Frye regularly throw yoga parties.

* Seinfeld's Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who says yoga eases heartache.

*Jane Fonda is more into yoga than aerobics these days.

*Clean and sober Charlie Sheen of Spin City recently used yoga and dieting to shed 30 pounds.

*Courtney Love raves that yoga not only toned her buff bod, it saves her life.

Enthusiastic Paltrow, encouraged by the way Madonna harnessed yoga power to get back into shape after the birth of her first child five years ago, has come a long way since she began classes.

"It's a purification process and totally changed my life," says Paltrow, 28, who went through emotional turmoil while breaking up with longtime loves Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck. "It's really about aligning your mind and spirit and body."

Yoga has special meaning for former model Cheryl Tiegs. Three years ago, she married her yoga teacher, Rod Stryker, who coaches celebrities like Robers, Ryan, Dennis Quaid and Sharon Lawrence at his Brentwood studio.

Singer Sheryl Crow has also fallen under the spell of the discipline and brought her own instructor along on a recent concert tour.

Lean and lovely Spanish actress Penelope Cruz is another devotee. "I did classical ballet for 14 years, but now yoga keeps me in shape," she says.

It's a great full-body workout, and it helps get rid of stress, too."

One of Hollywood's most dedicated practioners is 39 - year-old actress Mariel Hemingway, a yoga follower for more than a decade. The six-foot-tall mother of two explains what daily workouts mean to her:

"Yoga is the best way to find out what your body is. You use your breath almost like a chisel, and you sculpt the body you were given.

Hollywood's hottest new star

For a girl who is nursing a bad stomach after a safari trip in her native South Africa, Charlize Theron is looking remarkably fresh-faced. She emerges from her suite at The Villa at the exclusive Le Saint Geran in Mauritius in a low cut paisley print dress, proudly displaying her coltish 5ft 10 in physique, and peers out from behind naturally curly tresses. "Where's the sun?" she wails as the heavens open up for a second time that morning.

It would take more than an unseasonable downpour or minor ailment, however, to dampen the spirits of this 25-year-old actress.

When she left South Africa exactly ten years ago, after winning a competition to model in Milan, her future was uncertain. She was still dealing with the fallout of witnessing the appalling sight of her mother shooting her father in self defence (no charges were brought), but instead of descending into a predictable spiral of self-destruction, she carved a successful career for herself in Hollywood.

Since then she has acted alongside Tinseltown's leading men, including Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate, Matt Damon and Will Smith in The Legend Of Bagger Vance and Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules. She stars for a second time with Keanu in Sweet November, which opens this week.

She proved so popular with Woody Allen, who described her as "a force of nature" after directing her in Celebrity, that he has summoned her for a second time in his forthcoming The Curse Of The Jase Scropion.

Charlize takes such company in her stride. What she's really excited about is the reception she has just received in South Africa, where a leading magazine honoured her with a prestigious female achievement award and she was invited to have tea with Nelson Mandela.

"I was honoured to meet Nelson Mandela. It is astounding to see a man who has been through so much but harbours no bitterness whatsoever," she says. "Everything he says and does comes from a place of compassion and that's very inspiring."

She herself refuses to be eaten up by bitterness or the self-pity that might have come in the wake of her own tragic past. "It's such a personal thing. I really don't like talking about it," she says defensively. But the tragedy, she admits, may have spurred her on. "As with anything you go through in life, you can either sit and drown yourself in misery or turn it into something positive. I think positive thought and action is the only way to deal with the difficulty of life."

This goes a long way to explain why the actress has actively sought out roles of gathering gravitas. "Acting has been therapeutic because you get to confront things that perhaps you don't want to deal with. I use a lot of what I have experienced in life... not just that." 

Her latest role is of a free-spirited young woman who is suffering from a life-threatening illness. "I don't know what it is like to have a time limit on my life, but I do know we all take life for granted. We forget to appreciate the simple things. My own experiences have taught me to enjoy life because it might be short."

She lost 20lb for the role - not on director's orders but as a result of her own research. "I discovered one of the physical results of suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma can be weight loss so I took it upon myself to lose the weight.

Charlize is keen not to over emphasise the stunning good looks which have fuelled her success.

"I didn't work for a year when I started out acting because I didn't want to be just another beautiful girl," she explains. "Actresses have to play their looks down otherwise they're seen in one way and they don't get to play the versatile parts."

"Not working," Charlize sings in her faultless West Coast accent, which she mastered soon after she arrived in LA. There's no trace of the Afrikaans she spoke growing up in the farming town of Benoni outside Johannesburg, where her parents ran a road construction company. "Just because I speak in a fake American accent, doesn't make me any less South African," she insists. "This is to get the job done."

Outwardly at least, Charlize seems to have emerged unscathed from her volatile experience of family life and it's hard to see in what way her father's abusive behaviour and violent death has left its mark.

Her abhorrence of domestic violence may be one - the South African campaign against rape is a cause close to her heart. "One in three women will be raped in their lifetime in South Africa," she says. "We have the highest statistics in the world and that's frightening. Just being a woman makes that a concern you can relate to. You can't look at those statistics and not feel anger and compassion."

Though growing up in an unhappy household with an alcoholic father doesn't seem to have destroyed her faith in men or relationships, marriage is not on her "to do" list. "It has never really appealed to me," she says. "But I think we would all like to find that partner in crime - that person who can be your soulmate and who you can share your life with.

"I would love to have children but the whole traditional white dress and aisle thing never really appealed to me. You can have a great bond and not necessarily have to do any of that."

Her three-year relationship with Stephan Jenkins, singer with the band Third Eye Blind, is now at a definitive end and Charlize is prepared for the highs and lows of being single again - not plain sailing, it seems, even for the beautiful and talented. "I think men are still getting used to women being independent and powerful and being able to take care of ourselves. But I wish men would understand that we still need help - perhaps on a more emotional level. We can buy our own diamond earrings but guys, hold our hands when the plane takes off."

"I don't put too much emphasis on anything," she says, almost apologising for her pure lust for life. "I just think you should take the moment for what it is. Be compassionate, but go on that journey for happiness and you will be okay."

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