Basic Eight [Hardcover]

Daniel Handler (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: ALLISON & BUSBY (2002)
• ASIN: B000OLJ1SC
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (104 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I agree with the New Yorker (for once!), July 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Basic Eight (Hardcover)

The New Yorker called this one of the best first novels of the year, and I wholeheartedly agree. I read this book awhile ago, and I've been watching, with amusement, the love-hate relationship that people are having with it on this site. What seems clear is that some people are completely misunderstanding this novel. To call it shallow, silly and stupid is to insult the narrator, not the book. I think Handler does a splendid job of hiding a gripping story in between the lines of his character's diary--a character who is, after all, a high school girl, and it needs to be read twice, not because it's William Shakespeare but because there's a twist ending which makes you go back and see how well the author planned the whole thing out. This novel isn't for everyone--only for people intelligent and engaged enough to tell the narrator from the author. (And no, just for the record, I'm not the author's friend, agent, whatever...)

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well, it won't be an Oprah Book!, August 26, 2000

By 

"alexwriter" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Basic Eight (Paperback)

. . . but anyone who loves black comedy should read it -- twice. At first, this book seems like it's just going to be a wild romp through high school -- complete with kids who throw lavish dinner parties in sculpture gardens and drink cappuccino at coffee bars with names like Bean and Nothingness or Death Before Decaf. Only hitch is, we already know that the seemingly sweet ("fat", dowdy, lovesick) anti-heroine, Flannery Culp, has been convicted of the Satanic murder of her crush, Adam State in one of the media events of the century. How could this happen? The rest of the book is a puzzle, and we get it in pieces. From Dr. Eleonor Tert (a formerly drug-addicted flight attendant turned guru), Winnie Moprah (no relation, I'm sure), and even Guiness Book-reciting Flora Habstadt (who, Flannery assures us, was never one of the Basic Eight). And especially, from Flannery, who interrupts her perpetual prison solitaire game to explain how her love notes to Adam, experimentation with absinthe (Poe's drug of choice), her calculus teacher's command to "do something" (surely he didn't mean murder), and particularly, her coffee dates with the glamorous Natasha lead to . . . well, read it and find out.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I think I'm in love with Daniel Handler, August 2, 2002

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Basic Eight (Paperback)

Having read the first eight Lemony Snicket books to my daughter, it occurred to me that the literary output of the author's legal, literary, and social representative, Daniel Handler, might be equally delightful. I was not disappointed. *The Basic Eight* is a gem of a book. It grows on you as you read, building eventually into a book that cannot be put down--particularly toward the end of October in the narrative--and it leaves you thinking about it long after you've read the last page.

Mr. Handler, moreover, is a wonderful writer. The plotting of the book is masterful, and the pages are littered with beautiful, apt phrases/sentences--pearls, one might say--which one wants to linger over--over which one wants to linger. (For example, on p. 280: "I craned my neck to see who this person was, raised by wolves in some San Francisco wilderness and finally escaping by public transportation.")

Some reviewers have complained of inconsistencies in the narrative over the figure of Natasha--I'll not be more specific, as this isn't a spoiler. But, while I haven't reread the book to verify that everything is thus explicable, I think the point is that the whole story is being told through Flan's rather unreliable perspective. Surely that is explanation enough?

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece