MADreads

Good for a chuckle

June 10th, 2009 Lisa - Central

I love David Sedaris.  The persona he portrays in his essays is crabby, bratty, nerdy and terribly self-centered, but you love him anyway.  His When You Are Engulfed in Flames, while not his funniest book, was very entertaining and provided more than enough chuckles, and at least one guffaw.

He is at his best when writing about the people he’s known.  In “That’s Amore,” he describes Helen, a neighbor in his apartment building in New York.  She’s a tiny Italian woman, who can’t cook worth a dime (imagine her famous “Tomato Gravy with Rice and Canned Peas” dish), and has a potty mouth - I won’t quote anything here.  She says ‘terlet” and ‘earl” (toilet and oil) like my grandmother did.  She’s mean and competitive.  He makes her seem irresistible and someone you’d like to steer clear of at the same time.

Essays cover such deep and insightful topics as finding himself in a Parisian doctor’s waiting room in only his underwear, his parents’ art collection, and a nasty boil he got on his back.  Fully one third of the book is an essay devoted to his efforts to quit smoking.  The lucky duck decides to go to Tokyo for a month to change things up, to break him out of the habits he associated with having a cigarette.  He takes a class to learn Japanese and is humiliated at being worse than that “little idiot Sang Lee” - the Korean student who started out worse than him.  (The title of the book derives from his stay in Tokyo: it’s the translation into English of the Japanese instructions for a fire emergency.)

Irreverent, sardonic and silly, Sedaris is always a good read.

Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Nonfiction