Category: david sedaris

DAVID SEDARIS at 3am

I’m not doing so much of the sleeping at the moment, which is not good for the health but is extremely good for the reading list. Usually one chooses books by a series of criteria, such as – I’ve heard of it, it sounds interesting, it’s free; at the moment, I am choosing books based simply on the question: how will it read at 3am?

David Sedaris reads wonderfully well late at night, and thus over the last weeks I have read THE SANTALAND DIAIRIES, BARREL FEVER, DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDOURY AND DENIM, and NAKED.

Sedaris has made a career of writing humorously about his own life. It is the apotheosis of anecdote. This is a pretty small niche, and it sort of staggers me he can get this much material out of one little life.

Interestingly, it’s quite hard to give you a little excerpt that gives an example of how funny he is; it’s not a one-liner kind of thing, more a comic point of view, that’s hard to define precisely. That said, here’s him sleeping on the floor of a Greyhound bus:

The bus’s colossal engine lay just beneath my head, providing warmth for the countless bits of misplaced candy that melted to form a fragrant bed of molten taffy

.

Sedaris had some trouble with drugs, and with being a general layabout, for much of his twenties and thirties, and some of his stories are about this. I don’t know what it means about me that I find this procession of failures strangely comforting; I think it’s just that one isn’t used to anyone being so honest about where they went wrong.

He clearly had no career plan, but was eventually discovered reading aloud his diary ,which he had kept from age 21, in a Chicago club. This got him a spot on NPR with THE SANTALAND DIARIES – his essay about working as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s (say no more). He then wrote BARREL FEVER, which is the only one of his books I’ve read that is ‘fiction,’ and indeed the only one I gave up on. It’s interesting to see how difficult it is to be what you are: a personal essayist – in a world of novelists. No doubt there’s a moral in there somewhere. Then came NAKED (my second favourite, after WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES)and DRESS YOUR FAMILY.

So, apparently, I am now a Sedaris expert. And all the rest of you were wasting your time sleeping.

Book: WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED Contd

So yes, basically, I find it encouraging that David Sedaris wasted that much of his life and still seems to have got somewhere. Not that I’m some big druggie, but I’ve certainly wasted my fair share of time here and there.

I find Sedaris’ use of language strangely brilliant. I’ll laugh out loud at a sentence, and then spend ages trying to understand what about that turn of phrase made it so funny. It’s less about the comedy of incident,and more about the comedy of language, which is SO DIFFICULT. So well done that man.

He does on occasion try, especially at the ends of his stories, to give us a kind of literary thrill, or a sense that he’s been talking about something larger than we at first thought. This is only sometimes successful.

Disclaimer: Okay, I skipped some stories this time round. I really didn’t feel I could handle the death ones. Maybe when I know you better I’ll tell you why.

Book: WHEN YOU ARE IN ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris


Now, this is another kind of unusual book for me, because:

a)it was left at my house randomly, I didn’t choose it
b)for some reason, it is in large print. Which is odd, as the person who left it at my house has normal eyesight
c)this is a re-reading. And I almost never re-read

I re-read it because I hadn’t got to the Library and I was feeling a bit blah and I happened to see it and it looked cheering. It looks more sort of mangled, now, as it fell into the bath several times during this reading. Oh dear.

WHEN YOU ARE IN ENGULFED IN FLAMES is a series of comic short stories. The longest one is very long, and is about his attempt to give up smoking by moving to Tokoyo. David Sedaris actually really reminds me of Proust. Now, don’t be hating, and thinking I’m pretentious. I totally get to say that because a) it’s true and b) I’ve actually read IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, which, let’s face it all you Tolstoy loving bunch of bitches, is probably the best novel ever written. And I’m just saying ‘probably’ so as not to appear too dogmatic.

But please, let’s not even deny it’s the best novel of the twentieth century, because that’s just blatantly true, whether you like it or not (all you James Joyce loving bitches out there).

What I find similar in them is the kind of unassuming honesty they possess. It’s a book that makes you feel like you are less alone in the world; that other people are experiencing the day-to-day as you are. JANE EYRE is a fabulous novel, but it doesn’t deal at all with 95% percent of our lives – the pedestrian part.

The character that is David Sedaris in these stories is sort of sweetly imperfect. It’s interesting also that he seems to have blown large sections of his life on being kind of drugged up. I sometimes feel that . . . oh no, go to go. More on this tomorrow.