Sedaris offers advice to the eccentric

Por: AshLo | |

By Ashley Speagle
For the sarcastic, the odd and the vulgar...
Milk business class for all the ice cream you can eat, and be weary of thrift store pants that may give you crabs.

David Sedaris shares wisdom through yet another collection of autobiographical essays. However many times he opens up his life stories through his sarcastic narration, it still manages to generate chuckles. It’s never cheesy or overdone but always original and hilarious.

Sedaris discusses living in Paris, talking to a spider, the characters he has encountered while flying, and more in his sixth biographical account, “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.”

Sedaris is known as a contributor to National Public Radio and “The New Yorker,” and he is best described as a humorist. He doesn’t write about his life to share some horrible tragedy or to chisel away to the core meaning of his experiences. Readers don’t dive into his books eager to learn a life lesson but rather to admire his eloquent parade of words and to hear a good story from a comedic and talented storyteller.

The new book is like a well-written “Seinfeld” plot: it’s really not about anything. In “Solutions to Saturday’s Puzzle,” I could envision Jerry Seinfeld reading this essay, contemplating the serious situation of how to remove a throat lozenge that has fallen out of your mouth onto the lap of the woman beside you on an airplane.

He recalls insignificant moments, quirky moments and momentous moments in his life and talks about them with such witty and insightful comments that show he's able to laugh at and criticize himself for the purpose of entertaining readers.

It’s the small things that make his sometimes bizarre tales relatable.

He has a gift to look at his actions and thoughts and recall them with such honesty, however embarrassing or shameful they may turn out to be, and in turn he actually comments on human nature itself, giving the stories some meaning and moral ending.

In “Crybaby,” for example, Sedaris remembers a plane ride beside a crying Polish man who mourned the recent death of his mother, and Sedaris, in his wandering thoughts, pinpoints his own tendency to grieve with ingenuity and vanity.

“It was as if I’d learned to grieve by watching television: here you cry, here you throw yourself upon the bed, here you look in the mirror and notice how good you look with a tear-stained face.”
This is a perceptive comment on our society, the influence of pop culture, and it makes the reader tune in to the motivations behind their own behaviors.

This of course is all wrapped up within the larger funny story, which often trails into other flights of ridiculousness.

“Town and Country” demonstrates Sedaris’s other great gift of irony. While riding in a taxi cab, Sedaris encounters an uncomfortable dialogue with the crude, overtly sexual and derogatory taxi driver.

Sedaris meets his sister, Amy, after the ride, still feeling completely disgusted by the driver’s infatuation with “pussy.”

He soon finds himself regretting his high and mighty attitude towards this person, though, as he and his sister browse old pictures of bestiality that she shares with enthusiasm.

The last stop of Sedaris’s tales, told mostly non-chronologically, is in Japan where he attempts to quit his longtime smoking habit in “The Smoking Section.”

During his heroic fight against cigarettes, he also unsuccessfully learns Japanese, but he does resist tobacco temptations and gets the pink back in his gray complexion.

How many times has a book made you laugh? Not smirk but laugh out loud? That is the greatness of this book.