When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Reading this new collection of memoir-essay-stories by the master US humourist David Sedaris is like being tickled on the ribs by someone you love: you laugh hysterically, feel a mixture of excitement and irritation, and instinctively wriggle away as exhaustion sets in.
Flames reads like a hit-and-miss set; some selections simply run out of ideas before they’re over.
There are sidesplitting essays here, like the baccalaureate address he gave at Princeton University in 2006 and a primer on masculine style that includes wearing an external catheter called the 'Stadium Pal'.
For those already acquainted, the laughs are smaller and fewer in When You Are Engulfed in Flames - particularly when compared with one of Sedaris' past books, the riotous and moving Naked - so, too, are the quiet, humane revelations that for so long served as emotional ballast to Sedaris' comic flights.
It's much easier to laugh at a nudist colony than at death itself — which is essentially what Sedaris is doing in his latest collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
There is little of that sort of Chekhovian introspection in When You Are Engulfed in Flames, however. And little of the charming, self-deprecating humor that’s made a lot of his earlier work so popular among NPR listeners and New Yorker readers.
In his sixth collection of personal essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris continues to play the bemused outsider, the man poking his head through the doorway, looking askance at his own and other lives.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames is David Sedaris‘ weakest collection to date.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames presents 20-some story/essays about Sedaris' life and it would be no small task for me to single out any piece in this collection which did not incite audible laughter in this reader, much to the dismay of the other patrons of the local coffeehouse I periodically pollute with my guffawing.
There is less focus here on the Sedaris clan as a whole, though the various members make memorable and often hilarious appearances.
Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames continues the author’s saga, never straying from the biting style that has served him so well in his previous books.
...far too many of the remaining twenty-two essays in When You Are Engulfed similarly read like mere diary entries or notebook jottings: either their content amounts to no more than banal, everyday occurrences peppered with shreds of generic-sounding dialogue or they lack any emotional depth or introspection on the part of the author.