Biography & Autobiography |
Humor (Nonfiction) |
Nonfiction |
Essays |
Summary
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Finalist for the Audie Award in Humor
There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it.
If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There's a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party--lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.
These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harmless laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background--new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can't by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.
Author Notes
David Sedaris was born in Binghamton, New York on December 26, 1956, but he grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Much of Sedaris' humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and it often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of North Carolina. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. He is a popular radio commentator, essayist, and short story writer. He held many part-time and odd jobs before getting a job reading excerpts from his diaries on National Public Radio in 1992.
His first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, was published in 1994. His other works include Naked, Holidays on Ice, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002), and Calypso. Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2001. He has also written several plays with his sister Amy Sedaris including Stump the Host, Stitches, and The Little Frieda Mysteries. In 2014 her title, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The celebrated humorist returns with more offhand observations on the weird and tiresome in these sparkling diary excerpts. Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) riffs on life with his partner Hugh Hamrick as they brave awkward dinner parties; his obsession with picking up trash; the personal inconvenience of societal upheavals ("I was thinking of my beloved shops," he frets during a 2020 looting outbreak--"What'll happen if there's nothing left for me to buy!"); and the colorful, quotable eccentrics who materialize everywhere he goes. ("On my way for a coffee this morning, I passed a man with an umbrella on his head... 'The devil will fool you,' he told me.") The proceedings are saturated with Sedaris's trademark irony, wherein the search for energizing squalor ends only in the purgatory of the banal. "I'd like to see angry orphans and drunk people fighting," he notes at the start of a Bucharest sojourn, but at its conclusion he's trapped on an airliner as "the woman in front of me shoved her seat all the way back and the woman next to her put on some horrible melon-scented hand cream. I couldn't have been any more miserable." They may not stick to your ribs, but Sedaris's memoiristic nuggets are always tasty. Agent: Christina Concepcion, Don Congdon Assoc. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
There are two types of celebrity diaries. The first wrenches convulsive revelations from a corpse's cold grip and upturns what we thought we knew about a deceased public figure. The second is a living artist's selected highlights, a form of scrapbook memoir, polished until it reflects them in the best light. Humorist David Sedaris's diaries are closer to the second, though there is plenty of the fun and some of the juiciness of the first type too, evidenced in his response to a shop assistant who asks what he's looking for in a gift: "Well, grotesque is a plus." This second volume picks up where Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 left off, except now Sedaris is no longer struggling, no longer a drinker and, following the publication of his breakthrough book of comic essays Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), is that rarest of things: a rich writer. This means that during the course of the book he can buy a sprawling apartment in Manhattan ("at 10 o'clock last night I discovered a new bathroom"), hideous designer clothes that "to an undiscerning eye" make him "look like a tramp" and any amount of overpriced tat ("I knew immediately I had to have it," he says of an £8,000 stuffed kiwi). And now that he's famous, the staples of the book are his travels around the world to perform and his famously lengthy book signings, which last up to five hours. "I love how chatty Irish people are," he writes, though it means he "didn't leave the theatre until 1am". Wherever he goes he spots the precisely funny detail and finds the mot juste - like "relaxing" in the sentence "mice got into the chest of drawers and ate the relaxing eye mask that Joan gave Hugh for Christmas". Mostly A Carnival of Snackery is a compendium of the weird things picked up by Sedaris's magpie eye (and ear): he cracks up when a French interviewer describes her meeting with Penélope Cruz: "An incredibly nice person. And beautiful too, with flawless skin and the eyes of a donkey." Often, he actively seeks out material by asking shocking questions to fans in signing queues ("I'm conducting a little survey and was wondering if you've ever shit in your hand?"). This mostly works because his personal essays make people feel they know him and they open up to him in response, though it's less successful when he lists jokes people tell him, most of which are terrible but at least highlight how well-turned Sedaris's own gags are. Next to his pet peeves - rude people, over-friendly service staff and always, always litterbugs - more serious stuff is rarely dealt with: his agent's dementia and sister Tiffany's mental illness are presented almost as a diversion, at least until he reports their deaths. Compassion makes an occasional appearance - "how terrible their lives will be until they die," he writes of parents whose children died in a school shooting - but you won't find analysis here of the major events of these interesting years. The protests after the murder of George Floyd are less likely to attract reflection than sarcasm ("today, like yesterday, will be glorious, a beautiful day for setting trash cans on fire!") or a quip: "Just because you forced your way into the Nike store doesn't mean you can find your size in the stockroom." The jokes seem to thin out in the later years, as Trump takes power, as Sedaris's father's health declines, as Covid descends. We don't expect consistency from diarists, nor explication, and we don't get it, as people appear without introduction or footnote: in Sedaris's books, other people exist mainly to provide amusement. Best, then, not to read this book cover to cover, like a novel, but to use it as suggested by the title (which is taken from an Indian restaurant menu): to keep the appetite for delight and absurdity satisfied until the next Sedaris book comes along.
Kirkus Review
The second volume of diaries by Sedaris (after Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002), who navigates the early 21st century wealthier but still bemused. The flashpoints of the modern era--the Iraq War, Ferguson, Trump, Covid-19--pop up throughout these entries, but mainly so the author can sail past them with his usual irreverence. For example: "When the pandemic hit, my first thought wasn't Oh, those poor dying people but What about my airline status?" His bottomless capacity to make everything about him doesn't read as selfishness or ignorance, though; as with all good comics, the particulars of his life are stand-ins for everybody's foibles and frustrations. Traveling the world for readings, Sedaris takes note of every culture's peculiarities, from spitting on the street in Tokyo to offensive insults to language quirks--e.g., Tagalog is like "English on quaaludes." Sedaris treats his own life as a kind of foreign country, too. After moving from his longtime home in France to England, he began his hobby of picking up litter (documented in Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls), and the reactions of his neighbors, not to mention the trash itself, provide comic fodder. Family matters were trickier during this period: His troubled sister, Tiffany, killed herself, and his elderly but resilient father still treated him like a failure. Because Sedaris traveled all over the world during this stretch, the tone and form of the diaries shift; he's sometimes glib, sometimes contemplative, sometimes content just to catalog funny stuff he overhears. So for better or worse, he's a humorist who'll go anywhere. This book contains one of the best jokes about the Crucifixion you're likely to hear, along with a few subpar quips: "To honor the death of Marcel Marceau I observed a minute of silence." A rich trove for hardcore Sedaris fans, though no more personally revealing than his well-shaped essays. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Surely Sedaris has shared enough of his life in his audaciously funny and poignant essays, showcased in his first selected collection, The Best of Me (2020). Not so! His judiciously edited diaries, beginning with Theft by Finding: Diaries, 1977--2002 (2017) and continuing here, cast more light on his omnivorous curiosity, habit of vigilant observation, acid wit, and impishness. Mesmerizing and jolting, Sedaris recounts his seemingly perpetual world tour of literary performances with gleanings from his voracious eavesdropping and nervy chats with fellow passengers, drivers, and restaurant and hotel staff. Sedaris claims, "I just can't for the life of me figure out what to say to people," the instigation for the outrageously cheeky questions he asks fans who wait in hours-long lines to talk with him. Sedaris records his passions for collecting "rudeness stories" and picking up litter in his West Sussex environs, and how the latter effort inspires his community to dedicate a garbage truck to him. Sedaris' shrewdly sketched world travelogue, hilarious anecdotes, and frank reflections on loved ones, and life's myriad absurdities and cruelties major and minor, make for a delectably sardonic, rueful, and provocative chronicle.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sedaris' books are like a beloved, long-running sitcom; fans don't want to miss a word.
Library Journal Review
Sedaris's second collection of diary entries are more cosmopolitan and assured than his first collection, Theft by Finding, which covered 1977--2002. In spite of Sedaris's new financial security and his homes in Europe and the United States, the core of his personality and insecurity--which draws so many to his writing--remains. Sedaris is curious about the world, particularly its tawdry or ugly sides, and constantly aware of his role and complicity in that ugliness. His style of engagement means finding humor in nearly everything, often in ways that may elicit discomfort, though he is serious when it comes to tragedies such as mass shootings. For this reason, some will see his book as unsalvageable. Yet selected and edited as it is, his work is about radical vulnerability and reflects a universal experience of contending with one's internal life. "Who am I, how did I get to be this way, and what is wrong with me?" is a question Sedaris asks, and one worth asking. VERDICT Entertaining reading in itself, with references to some of the books he published in this era; a must-read for Sedaris's many fans.--Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.