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Loading... Me Talk Pretty One Dayby David Sedaris
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I love David Sedaris, and I love lost-in-translation humor, so of course this is my favorite of his collections: David Sedaris attempting--without great success--to learn to speak French while living in France. His self-deprecating humor works especially well here, and the self-cultural-deprecation of the Ugly American who comes to France "dressed as though you've come to mow its lawns". My favorite stories are the title story, "The Youth in Asia," "See You Again Yesterday," and "Picka Pocketoni." ( )I laughed out loud more than I have at any book in a very long time. These autobiographical essays are hilarious. They cover a lot of ground, from wacky family quirks to Sedaris's difficulties with the French language, but every one is told in the same dry tone where the absurdities almost sneak up on you. I'll definitely have to pick up some more Sedaris sometime. Another great collection of drop-dead acidly funny stories from the life of the author, a gay American male of Greek extraction who spends part of his time living in France with his boyfriend Hugh. Sedaris is so pointedly self-deprecating it almost constitutes self-abuse. He writes in an elegantly humorous style that is frequently punctuated with nuggets of pure hilarity that had me unexpectedly snorting. There is even a semi-profound passage, at the end of "I Almost Saw This Girl Get Killed". Also, after reading about her in her brother's book, I have to track down what Amy Sedaris has written. Fun read! There are some of the stories that are definitely laugh-out-loud funny! I love stories about Hugh.
Whereas ''Naked'' reads like a series of overlapping autobiographical essays, this volume feels more like a collection of magazine pieces or columns on pressing matters like the care and feeding of family pets and the travails of dining in Manhattan. But if Mr. Sedaris sometimes sounds as though he were making do with leftover material, ''Talk Pretty'' still makes for diverting reading. The gifted Sedaris has not been hard enough on himself. At the risk of sounding patronizing, I suspect there is a better writer in there than he is as yet willing to let out. This collection is, in its way, damned by its own ambitious embrace of variety; with so many pieces assembled, the stronger ones always punish the weaker... But reading or listening to David Sedaris is well worth the lulls for the thrills.
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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