Book Review - David Sedaris

David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed In Flames (Little, Brown and Company, 336 pages, $16.99)

In his latest collection of humourous, reflective personal essays, American funnyman David Sedaris tackles nightmarish babysitters with back scratchers, surly New York neighbours and the lancing of boils. While the stories have shifted to reflect Sedaris’ change in lifestyle over the years—we get fewer stories about his childhood and his younger-year escapades (although “Road Trips,” the sole hitchhiking tale in this collection, is one of the highlights) and more tales of airline travel and living in France—Sedaris hasn’t lost his unique ability to have his neuroticism put him in awkward and hilarious situations, like the time he got into a fight with the woman sitting next to him on an airplane because he wouldn’t trade seats with her husband (“Ordinarily I’d be happy to move, but he’s in the bulkhead and I just hate that seat”) and then accidentally spits a cough drop on her lap as she’s sleeping. Indeed, part of Sedaris’ charm is that he makes us feel okay about being neurotic, occasionally obsessive and delusional—sometimes even allowing us to feel relieved that we’re not that bad. (I, for one, would never go so far as to trap flies to feed to a spider living on my windowsill, then take said spider with me when I moved away only to return it to its more rural home after realising the work it took to keep it fed at my new location.)

True, not all of us can imagine ourselves volunteering at medical examiner’s offices or moving to Tokyo to quit smoking, but there is a universalness to Sedaris’ work that can’t be denied. And while regular readers of the New Yorker won’t find too much new material in here—most of these essays first appeared there—it’s still a wonderful collection.

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David Sedaris
7pm Thursday, June 11
Bolen Books, Hillside Mall
FREE • 250-595-4232