Paperback, 272 pages
English language
Published June 8, 2001 by Little, Brown & Co..
A recent transplant to Paris, humorist David Sedaris, bestselling author of “Naked”, presents a collection of his strongest work yet, including the title story about his hilarious attempt to learn French. A number one national bestseller now in paperback.
Read it because people said it's funny, parts of it are, but not enough endorphins to keep me reading.
David Sedaris is insightful and hilarious. He has an amazing ability to write his characters saying the perfect thing to epitomise themselves and the situation they're in for maximum honest hilarity.
Not sure if it wasn't as good as Calypso, or his books get tiresome after the first, but I felt as if this was a slog with few humorous moments. Certainly my last Sedaris book.
Admittedly I don't really know who David Sedaris is other than Amy's brother. Not quite sure where this book came from, either. So I remain sort of mystified as to why I picked it up & why I read the whole thing. It's good, in that it's not bad. In fact, I exhaled sharply through my nose on several occasions. It may not contain the answers to life's mysteries but there are worse ways to spend an evening, I'm sure, than reading some loosely strung-together anecdotes.
I'm not going to write a detailed review of this one. The stories, individually, are generally a little humorous but it doesn't add up to a meaningful whole picture of the author.
David Sedaris is a self-deprecating narcissist... Is that a thing? Anyway, he's very funny. I don't think this is his best collection of essays--he has gotten much better at writing good conclusions, which are notoriously difficult--but they are typical David Sedaris. Favorites from this collection are the essays about speech therapy and learning French.
Riotous.
Only a few are dated (Clinton jokes?) and those living-in-a-foreign-country inside-David's-head are excellent.
Nice, elegantly-written, autobiographical stories.
