When You Are Engulfed in Flames
by David Sedaris
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Book Reviews of When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Book Review: De' Ja' Sedaris
Summary: 3 Stars
Writer/humorist David Sedaris' sixth book delivers the hilarity and razor-sharp wit, social commentary, and tenderness of his previous books, but fans of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Naked may be in for a bit of a disappointment. His previous smashing success has made it increasingly hard for him to top himself. Upon diving into Sedaris' latest collection of autographical essays, one can't help but feel De' Ja' Vu. Any fans will have already seen all of these essays featured in the New Yorker magazine already over the past three or four years. I was a bit disappointed to get the "Wait a minute, I've read this before!" feeling with the opening story, "It's Catching," about his mother-in-law's medical bout with a worm living under her skin. But I guess we can't really blame Mr. Sedaris for the fact that we love him so much that we've already read pretty much all of these in The New Yorker, Esquire, etc. magazines.
Fans of Augusten Burroughs will enjoy Sedaris and also recognize him as a much more believable writer of the memoir. Unlike previous collections which each focus on one part of his life, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," covers the range of Sedaris' anecdotal life: from childhood and life at home with his mom and sisters, to his adult life, including when he first moved to Paris and dropped out of French classes and ran around telling everyone "D'accord" because of his limited vocabulary. Because this book covers such a wide Sedaris life range, it feels almost like a "best of" kind of collection.
The book manages to only give you a good quiet laugh, not the rollicking hilarity of his previous works (check out "Santaland Diaries" from 'Holidays on Ice,' where Sedaris chronicles his days working as a Macy's elf, and "Repeat after Me" from 'Dress Your Family...' and 'David Sedaris: Live at Carnegie Hall). But remember this is David Sedaris here, so a quiet laugh still far exceeds any other American humorist writing today. Some of the highlights in this collection include: "Keeping Up," a day around the zoo with Sedaris and his partner Hugh, and in the mind of Sedaris' during a lover's quarrel; "Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?"--Sedaris chronicles his trial use of an external catheter (Window seat in a cross-country non-stop flight? Don't mind if I do!); "Memento Mori," one of the funniest stories here, chronicling Sedaris' purchase of an actual human skeleton, and the ensuing spookhouse terror of keeping it in his home; and the memorable "What I Learned," Sedaris' speech to graduates of Princeton, his alma mater.
Fans will want this book to add to their Sedaris collection, but it could also be a good, safe introduction to Sedaris newbies, as the 10-15 page essays here aren't as bizarre as previous works ('Naked' being the weirdest). Where the book is worth a read (or a purchase) is in the 60-some page "The Smoking Section" memoir. Here Sedaris chronicles his life as a smoker, from childhood when he first began to smoke (including how in school they went on field trips to the cigarette factory and were given cigarettes to "take home to your parents"), to his efforts to quit by moving to Hiroshima. (The title of the book is derived from an actual public smoking warning during his stay in Japan.)
This is so-so Sedaris, which is still a heckuva lot funnier than anyone else out there. For more laughs, check out his other books, PLUS don't be surprised if you get addicted to his audiobooks, which he and his sister Amy Sedaris read. The audiobooks themselves are gold as his readings make the essays even more hilarious.
Book Review: Sedaris in a More Reflective Mood But Still Providing His Typically Sardonic Quips
Summary: 4 Stars
Avid readers of The New Yorker may be disappointed to find most of the stories here are reprints from past issues of the magazine. That's why it's a good thing that David Sedaris' essays hold up to repeated readings. The intentionally awkward title of the renowned humorist's latest collection of stories - 22 in total - comes from a list of fire escape instructions he found in his Japanese hotel room, a country to which he had traveled to stop smoking. His adventure is detailed in one of his more thoughtful accounts, "The Smoking Section", a near-novella at 83 pages. In typical form, Sedaris describes his addiction to candid zingers, but he becomes more contemplative once he does stop smoking and journeys to Tokyo to find his comic muse again, whether it's attending a language class, reading labels at the supermarket, or scraping the fecal matter off his shoe. The essay turns serious in Hiroshima where he visits the Peace Museum, which I agree is a tortuous exhibit to see for the visual devastation you see after the A-bomb hit the city. The net effect of his approach enhances the depth of his storytelling even if the laughs are not as forthcoming.
Aside from his smoke-enders story, some of the others run longer than the author's usual length. A good example is "That's Amore", a twenty-plus-page story he shares about a particularly cranky New York neighbor named Helen. There are laughs to be found, especially as he searches for her dentures in the shrubs below her window. However, he delves more deeply into the details of this surprising friendship rather than reaching for the next funny anecdote, and the story becomes more poignant than funny when the elderly Helen falls ill. A more familiar Sedaris can be found in "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle" in which he describes a flight to Raleigh on which he encounters a most difficult passenger who is the very definition of high maintenance. He makes a familiar situation purely his own, and as someone who regales in his acute observations of the human condition at its worst, Sedaris takes special delight in tormenting his fellow flyer no matter how inadvertently.
The rest of his essays are more typical of what we expect from Sedaris, running the gamut from his parents' efforts to become art collectors in "Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool" to life in the French countryside with his partner of nine years, set designer Hugh Hamrick. Hugh figures prominently in "Keeping Up", which exposes the author's innate haplessness in social situations and how he appreciates his partner even more as someone he truly cannot live without. I also particularly liked "Crybaby", a brief account of another airplane trip in which the author meets a grieving widower, watches a Chris Rock movie and is suddenly reminded of his own childhood forty years ago. Other episodes have him buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina, recalling a nasty babysitter named Mrs. Peacock who made children scratch her back with a plastic monkey hand; buying Hugh a human skeleton for Christmas, and responding to old people who don't act their age but still feel entitled to have his seat on the bus. Not as seamless or laugh-out-loud as Me Talk Pretty One Day, my personal favorite of his collections, this book shows a mellower Sedaris still good for a sharp quip but looking a little further past his next line.
Book Review: Made me a fan of the author
Summary: 5 Stars
I had never read anything by David Sedaris until a student
mentioned his latest book, WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN
FLAMES . . . she said it had been a big help to her when she
quit smoking . . . so because of my interest in that topic, I
immediately went out and got a copy--and am glad that I did.
Sedaris is an American humorist, author and radio contributor . . . he
has written several bestsellers, all of which have been collections
of his essays.
WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED concludes with a longish piece
about the author's attempts to quit smoking . . . that was what
I read first and doing so enabled me to develop a better understanding
of the smoker's mentality . . . in particular, this passage caught my
attention:
* When I look back on my many years of smoking, the only real regret
I have is all the litter I generated, all those hundreds of thousands
of butts crushed underfoot. I was always outraged when a driver
would empty his ashtray onto the asphalt. "What a pig!" I'd think. But
he only did in bulk what I did piecemeal. In a city you tell yourself
that someone will clean it up, someone who wouldn't have a job
unless you dropped that butt onto the sidewalk. In that respect
you're good, you're helping. Then too, it never felt like real litter,
like tossing down, say, a broken lightbulb. No one was going
to cut his foot on a cigarette butt, and because of its earthy
color it pretty much disappeared into the landscape, the way a
peanut shell might. This made it "organic" or "biodegradable" --one
of those words that meant "all right."
That made me think about why others never realized this fact . . . but then
again, maybe they will after reading this book.
Other parts had me laughing, such as when he talked about fashion:
* In 1976 my glasses were so big I could clean the lenses with
a squeegee. Not only were they huge, they were also green
with Playboy emblems embossed on the stems. Today these frames
sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish. Time
is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses
for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass
you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem
with fashion. Though design may reach an apex, it never settles back
and calls it quits. Rather, it just keeps reaching, attempting to satisfy
our insatiable need to buy new stuff. Squinting is timeless, but so,
unfortunately, are the blinding headaches that often accompany it.
And then there was this observation that put a smile on my face:
* That's Business Elite for you. Spend eight thousand dollars on a ticket,
and if you want an extra thirteen cents' worth of ice cream, all you have
to do is ask. It's like buying a golf cart and having a few tees thrown in,
but still it works, "Golly," I say. "Thanks!"
As a result of reading WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED, I've become a
David Sedaris fan . . . I now look forward to reading future books by
him, but in the meantime, I plan to go back and read some of his
earlier stuff.
Book Review: Very funny, with the "warmth of Cray"? D'accord!
Summary: 5 Stars
David Sedaris is a very funny story writer whose work often appears in The New Yorker, and who can occasionally heard on NPR reading his stories. This collection of some two dozen of his autobiographical stories titled, WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, exhibits the humor, caustic wit, and sometimes bizarre, even shocking episodes that one has come to expect and love in Sedaris's work.
In ENGULFED IN FLAMES he discusses such things as the drug use and cigarette smoking of his younger days, his having been solicited by seemingly ordinary folk who pick him up hitchhiking, his attempts at language learning (including the universal applicability of the phrase, "D'accord!"), and his experiences of everyday life in France, Japan, and the United States. Curiously, the more exotic stories tend to be those set in America--at home in North Carolina, in New York City, or on the road. In one story ("Town and Country") he describes a patrician, refined looking couple who sit next to him on a flight, and who turn out to be as crude and foul-mouthed as they come. Some of his funniest, most poignant stories involve his mom. In a flashback to childhood ("In the Waiting Room"), his mom spies him chewing on a big chunk of meat: "'I hope you choke to death,' she said. I was twelve years old, and paused, thinking, Did I hear her correctly? `That's right, piggy, suffocate.' In that moment, I hoped that I *would* choke to death." This reminiscence happens to take place as he finds himself accidentally--a misprision of language-- sitting in a French doctor's waiting room clad in nothing but his briefs.
The longest story in the collection, "The Smoking Section," has to do with Sedaris's quitting smoking while also living in Japan for a time. Written as a journal, the piece celebrates the joy of smoking, the challenges of quitting, and the peculiarities of life in Japan. The funniest parts have to do with his frustrated attempts to learn the language. A young Korean woman in his class named Sang Lee, also struggling with Japanese, serves as his foil and so the target of his humor. At one point early on, he learns that most of the class already knows hiragana, the Japanese syllabary. One of his classmates tells him he "just picked it up." "'A flu is something you "just pick up,"' I told him.... `Picked it up,' indeed. I know two characters. That's it. Only two. This puts me ahead of that loveable nitwit, Sang Lee, but still, it's not much of a lead." It's to Sedaris's credit that his mockery, though at first surprising and sometimes even shocking, never comes off as cruel. There's always a humanity and decency to his stories. Sang Lee, in fact, ends up outshining Sedaris, who drops out of class (and subsequently mocks Japanese attempts at English, such as, "With being enchanted by the warmth of Cray and the tradition of pottery over the period...").
David Sedaris has yet to put out a disappointing collection. WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES is another offering that will delight the reader.
Book Review: Laugh out loud funny
Summary: 4 Stars
David Sedaris' latest collection is well worth reading, or even better, listening to. I listened to When You are Engulfed in Flames as an audio-book, read by the author. Sedaris' deadpan delivery is priceless. Four of the stories in this collection are recorded live. These stories are among the best in the collection, but they are enhanced by a live audience (those pregnant pauses, the anticipation, and the delirious laughter that follows each punchline).
Sedaris' stories (or essays, as they are often referred to) are amusing, presumably real-life, anecdotes about the mundane. These are like the stories told by the funniest guy at a dinner party.
As with any collection of stories (or essays), some are better than others. When You are Engulfed in Flames actually gets off to a weak start, leading off with the least engaging story in the bunch (It's Catching). The second story (Keeping Up) is amusing enough, but I was starting to think about listening to something else at this point. The next few stories were quite a bit funnier (I particularly liked Road Trips and What I Learned). By this point I was hooked. The audio version really hits its stride with the live readings of In the Waiting Room, Solutions to Saturdays Puzzle, Memento Mori, and Town and Country. The remainder of the collection doesn't maintain the same quality but all are entertaining enough (Of Mice and Men is the highlight of the `back end'). The final story, Smoking Section, is by far the longest story in the collection (25% of the CD space) and unfortunately, it's an uneven effort. Smoking Section feels like raw material that hasn't been properly culled. There is enough material in the story to create 3 or 4 short essays (I especially enjoyed David's foray into the world of competitive swimming). As it is, it lacks focus and rambles on.
In Canada we have a much beloved story-teller named Stuart McLean who is virtually unknown outside the Great White North (we also watch a uniquely Canadian television show called Corner Gas and drink coffee at a place called Tim Horton's). David Sedaris is similar to McLean in that he tells amusing anecdotes' to the delight of many; however there is a distinct difference. McLean is strictly G rated entertainment; sentimental and charming. Sedaris, while not R rated, is delivering PG material. Readers and listeners should be prepared for coarse language, sexual content, and references to recreational drug use. Some may find Sedaris' humour to be a little caustic. (Although many of us like caustic humour)
All in all, this is a highly entertaining collection of stories. If you don't feel inclined to read them all, I suggest you consider picking up When You are Engulfed in Flames and reading Memento Mori, Solutions to Saturdays Puzzle, Town and Country, In the Waiting Room, What I Learned, Of Mice and Men, and Road Trips. If you have access to the audio version, I highly recommend it. These are stories that were meant to be read out loud.