Customer Reviews - When You Are Engulfed in Flames
By now, David Sedaris is a household name for anyone who listens to "This American Life" on NPR or reads the New Yorker religiously. I first came upon the author when my cousin read me his SantaLand Diaries. Because I do not enjoy being read to aloud, I would look over her shoulder and silently read along (which turned out to be a bit ahead), and then wait for her to get to the punchlines so that I could laugh out loud at the correct moments. The laughing out loud wasn't hard to do, but the waiting for my cousin to get there was. It was the funniest thing I had read in a good long while. I have never heard "This American Life," but I have since read many of his essays, both in his previous works of collected essays and those that have been published in the New Yorker.
WHILE YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES is Sedaris's sixth book, and it opens with a bang but slowly loses steam until the long essay at the end. "The Smoking Session" chronicles his quest to stop smoking after his mother dies of lung cancer. It starts off in traditional essay fashion and then concludes with diary entries --- dates and all --- for each day he is in Tokyo kicking the habit. Perhaps because addiction is such a powerful and personal topic, this is the funniest, the most intimate and the most human of the essays here.
This is not to say that the others are devoid of humor, intimacy or humanness, for to lack such things would be completely un-Sedaris-like. But in "The Smoking Section," where he reminisces about previously quitting drugs and alcohol, along with the present cigarettes, he is back to being Sedaris at his finest. It is almost as if this small section is the book itself and the rest of the stories are filler --- good on their own but a bit tedious side by side in book format. This may be due to the fact that many were first published elsewhere, thus they lack thematic continuity.
These essays, however, are still worthy of merit. Those that originally appeared in the New Yorker are by far the best of that bunch, and the rest are interesting for anyone already familiar with Sedaris --- for each story is one more puzzle piece into the life of the man we feel we know. Taken as a whole, they bring comedy to everyday life and a narrative to everyday experiences. He writes of his family, his schooldays, his travels, his relationships, and all other phases of life both important and trivial --- and the trivial is made significant by its insight and irony. Sedaris kept journals before becoming a writer in the professional sense of the word, and he has truly turned his personal hobby into a unique literary endeavor that appears effortless and without fault.
In WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, like all previous works of his that I have read, his homosexuality doesn't come into play until the middle of the book. In this way he is a writer who just happens to be gay instead of a "Gay Writer." As a minority writer and an advocate for gay rights, I find it refreshing that his sexuality is treated no differently than that of anyone else. Sedaris writes of his life with his boyfriend Hugh and focuses as much on their day-to-day existence as a couple as on the fact that they are two males in love. He has his coming-out stories and his in-the-closet stories, but all these are treated as no more or no less important than everything else he writes about. The result is literature that can be read by gay males but is not written specifically for gay males, and this seems to create a sense of normalcy that homosexuals of both genders often lack in this hyper homo-aware generation, which is at once friendly and phobic.
Sedaris --- Greek, middle-class, gay, and with his own set of neuroses --- is an individual to whom we can all relate --- if not in specifics, at least in the sense of a self-conscious, second-guessing, blundering and selfish existence. He tries to be nothing other than what he is --- a human being. And for this we can't help but love him.
--- Reviewed by Shannon Luders-Manuel
Customer Reviews & Ref: My Associates Store Books - When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Public Radio International's "This American Life." He is the author of the books Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, and Barrel Fever.
David Sedaris (born December 26, 1956) is a Grammy Award-nominated American humorist, writer, comedian, and radio contributor. Sedaris came to prominence in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "SantaLand Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. Each of his five subsequent essay collections, Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), have become New York Times Best Sellers.[2][3][4][5][6] As of 2008, his books had collectively sold 7 million copies.[7] Much of Sedaris' humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and it often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, homosexuality, and his life in France with his boyfriend, Hugh Hamrick.
Ref & Info: David Sedaris - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No comments:
Post a Comment