Culture

This entertaining read is the newest collection of short essays from humourist and writer David Sedaris, who burst onto the scene with his second book Me Talk Pretty One Day. As with his previous essay collections, Sedaris’ essays cover his childhood in North Carolina, the state of present-day America, his family and his life abroad. Several of his essays are (hilariously) told in the voice of different characters, like an obnoxious American girl who talks in a British accent and a ridiculously conservative idiot redneck.

Sedaris’ writing style is witty, fluent, and easy to read, and he is astutely observant of both the ridiculous and sublime detail that peppers everyday life. Sedaris is also completely willing to be unselfconscious about his own foibles; clearly he has no problem coming across as finicky, judgemental, macabre and just plain weird. These are the only adjectives you can use to describe a guy who devotes one whole essay to his disgust at Chinese social habits and food and another to taxidermy. In the latter, he attempts to find the perfect Valentine’s Day gift (a stuffed owl) and ends up quite willingly touching a dead man’s preserved arm.

Sedaris’ self-deprecating sense of humour is fairly low key – more baleful wit than belly laughs – and perhaps this is why I finished the book feeling somehow underwhelmed. Maybe it was my expectation that the book would be funnier than it actually was; maybe it was my assumption that I’d be ROFLMAO at least some of the time. Regardless, the book induced in me wry smiles rather than actual laughter.

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that he was named “Humo[u]rist of the Year” by Time magazine, and he won the Thurber Prize for American Humo[u]r in 2001. Clearly, he knows what he’s doing. But he’s not a comedian, and perhaps I got the two mixed up – hence my sense of slight deflation when I finished the book.

This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy reading it. The essays are often amusing and sometimes thought-provoking, and a few of them (particularly the ones written from the point of view of a fictional character) were viciously funny. In fact, these latter essays were the ones I enjoyed the most, primarily for their bite. The essay “Just a Quick Email,” for example, is a tour de force of succinct, concise, passive-aggressive bitchiness at its best (the fictional character is writing this “quick email” to her paralysed-from-the-waist-down sister and ends the email with “Gotta run!”). In total, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls is a breezy, easy read, and probably great for the beach.