By Paul Carrier
To describe David Sedaris as a funny guy is to belabor the obvious. So it comes as no surprise that his self-deprecating wit and biting sense of humor are on display once again in Calypso, his 11th collection of stories and essays.
Yet an undertone of sober reflection also permeates this slim volume, as Sedaris, now in his 60s, muses on some of the big and small changes that have helped to define his life. They range from the relatively mundane — relocating from France to Britain — to the momentous — the premature deaths of his mother and his sister, Tiffany, and his strained relationship with his elderly father.
Family, aging and mortality are recurring themes in Calypso. Soon, Sedaris writes, he and his sisters will be the same age their mother was “when she got cancer and was killed by it. Then we’ll be even older, which just seems wrong, against nature somehow.” Two pages later, Sedaris finds himself reflecting on Tiffany, who took her own life in 2013, only weeks shy of her 5oth birthday.
But not to worry. There’s more than enough snort-worthy material here to leaven the package. I don’t know if Sedaris would describe himself as a smirking curmudgeon, but that’s how he often comes across. He has a knack for blending the cynical and the movingly introspective, without making the pairing seem incongruous.
Some of the pieces in Calypso even take a comical look at the more absurd aspects of growing older.
When Sedaris first gets a Fitbit, he finds himself at an airport, waiting to catch a flight. Inspired by his new toy, he begins pacing to rack up steps “rather than doing what I normally do, which is to sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what.”
As people age, Sedaris suggests, they go bonkers, either as crazy dog people or as crazy diet people. Sedaris’ younger brother Paul, we are told, falls into the latter category.
Once overweight, the slimmed-down Paul now exercises fanatically and “has all but given up on solid food,” surviving instead on bizarre concoctions whipped up in his juicer by blending “kale, carrots, celery, (and) some kind of powder scraped off the knuckles of bees.” The unappealing result “comes out dung-colored and the texture of applesauce.”
Sedaris is known for his autobiographical essays, which tend to be classified as nonfiction, although they stretch credulity from time to time. Readers, or at least this one, are left with the impression that Sedaris loves to take a factual anecdote or incident and feverishly embellish it to the breaking point, if not beyond, all in the name of making what’s already funny even funnier.
When Sedaris visits Tokyo, for example, he ostensibly purchases countless pieces of funky clothing while binge shopping in bizarre retail outlets. Is Sedaris recounting actual events here? Or is he testing how much he can get away with by giving free rein to his imagination?
The author segues from one topic to the next with remarkable ease, sometimes covering so much turf over the course of a few breezy pages that it’s tempting to go back and dissect how so many seemingly unrelated topics somehow coalesce.
Musing about his Fitbit, as he does periodically in Calypso, Sedaris quickly slides in references to his fear of snakes, his obsession with picking up litter in the English countryside, the sight of a cow “with two feet sticking out of her” as she gives birth, his first kidney stone (New York, 1991) and the fact that he often finds condoms, KFC containers and Handy Wipes “in one of the spots that I patrol” as a litter fighter. “Do they eat fried chicken and then have sex,” he asks, “or is it the other way around?”
This collection even offers up a smattering of truly trivial trivia, such as the most often used words in France (connerie: bullshit) and America (awesome), and the horrendously hilarious insults Europeans have concocted to vex bad drivers and other foes.
Yet an undertone of sober reflection also permeates this slim volume, as Sedaris, now in his 60s, muses on some of the big and small changes that have helped to define his life. They range from the relatively mundane — relocating from France to Britain — to the momentous — the premature deaths of his mother and his sister, Tiffany, and his strained relationship with his elderly father.
Family, aging and mortality are recurring themes in Calypso. Soon, Sedaris writes, he and his sisters will be the same age their mother was “when she got cancer and was killed by it. Then we’ll be even older, which just seems wrong, against nature somehow.” Two pages later, Sedaris finds himself reflecting on Tiffany, who took her own life in 2013, only weeks shy of her 5oth birthday.
But not to worry. There’s more than enough snort-worthy material here to leaven the package. I don’t know if Sedaris would describe himself as a smirking curmudgeon, but that’s how he often comes across. He has a knack for blending the cynical and the movingly introspective, without making the pairing seem incongruous.
Some of the pieces in Calypso even take a comical look at the more absurd aspects of growing older.
When Sedaris first gets a Fitbit, he finds himself at an airport, waiting to catch a flight. Inspired by his new toy, he begins pacing to rack up steps “rather than doing what I normally do, which is to sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what.”
As people age, Sedaris suggests, they go bonkers, either as crazy dog people or as crazy diet people. Sedaris’ younger brother Paul, we are told, falls into the latter category.
Once overweight, the slimmed-down Paul now exercises fanatically and “has all but given up on solid food,” surviving instead on bizarre concoctions whipped up in his juicer by blending “kale, carrots, celery, (and) some kind of powder scraped off the knuckles of bees.” The unappealing result “comes out dung-colored and the texture of applesauce.”
Sedaris is known for his autobiographical essays, which tend to be classified as nonfiction, although they stretch credulity from time to time. Readers, or at least this one, are left with the impression that Sedaris loves to take a factual anecdote or incident and feverishly embellish it to the breaking point, if not beyond, all in the name of making what’s already funny even funnier.
When Sedaris visits Tokyo, for example, he ostensibly purchases countless pieces of funky clothing while binge shopping in bizarre retail outlets. Is Sedaris recounting actual events here? Or is he testing how much he can get away with by giving free rein to his imagination?
The author segues from one topic to the next with remarkable ease, sometimes covering so much turf over the course of a few breezy pages that it’s tempting to go back and dissect how so many seemingly unrelated topics somehow coalesce.
Musing about his Fitbit, as he does periodically in Calypso, Sedaris quickly slides in references to his fear of snakes, his obsession with picking up litter in the English countryside, the sight of a cow “with two feet sticking out of her” as she gives birth, his first kidney stone (New York, 1991) and the fact that he often finds condoms, KFC containers and Handy Wipes “in one of the spots that I patrol” as a litter fighter. “Do they eat fried chicken and then have sex,” he asks, “or is it the other way around?”
This collection even offers up a smattering of truly trivial trivia, such as the most often used words in France (connerie: bullshit) and America (awesome), and the horrendously hilarious insults Europeans have concocted to vex bad drivers and other foes.
