When You Are Engulfed in Flames
2007
- social life and customs
- manners and customs
- essays
- nonfiction
- american essays
- humor (nonfiction)
- american humorous stories
- wit and humor as topic
- american wit and humor
- humor, form, essays
The story
"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" *(Seattle Times).* Table of Contents: It’s Catching Keeping Up The Understudy This Old House Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie? Road Trips What I Learned That’s Amore The Monster Mash In the Waiting Room Solutions to Saturday’s Puzzle Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool Memento Mori All the Beauty You Will Ever Need Town and Country Aerial The Man in the Hut Of Mice and Men April in Paris Crybaby Old Faithful The Smoking Section
What it’s like
Sharp, conversational sentences that feel like being told a story across a kitchen table, with the comic timing of a well-placed pause and the occasional sudden swerve into something tender. Each essay is a short, self-contained wander, so the book suits dipping in for one piece at a time: a rainy Sunday with a mug going cold, a late-night read when sleep won't come, or a slow commute where a single essay fits neatly between stops. The register is wry and observational, with humiliations of ordinary life (a dropped lozenge, a noisy neighbour, a dull wait at the doctor's office) rendered with precise, affectionate absurdity, and the emotional undertow tends to surface quietly near the end of each piece rather than arriving as a shock. Its people are self-deprecating narrators who fret, overthink and occasionally mellow, so the arc across the book is one of a wry, anxious observer slowly making peace with his own foibles. Intensity is low: there is no gore and little real violence, though some pieces touch on drug use, smoking, illness and mild sexual innuendo, and one or two carry a brief pang of grief. It is for readers who want laughter with a bit of heart, and who enjoy the particular pleasure of a witty sentence that lands exactly where it should.
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