Tracy's review

[close]

blog this review

Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1044355.When_You_Are_Engulfed_in_Flames?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="When You Are Engulfed in Flames" border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51rI%2BNF4VwL._SL160_.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1044355.When_You_Are_Engulfed_in_Flames?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">When You Are Engulfed in Flames</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2849.David_Sedaris">David Sedaris</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/24803128?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>As a major fan of David Sedaris I could not wait for this latest collection of essays and was overjoyed when I saw the promise of the Van Gogh painting on the cover, for what can top Sedaris, Van Gogh, and a smoking skeleton all mixed together?! A talking skeleton that says, “You are going to die.” <br/> <br/>I thoroughly enjoyed this latest collection of essays that moved Mr. Sedaris from his wonderfully dysfunctional family and shifted the focus onto mortality and monogamy in middle age. For Sedaris fans still looking for stories about the sibs, they do make cameos in discussions about the numbers of children startled to death each year or selecting the proper sex periodical to display when dad comes to visit, but all in all, he seems to draw his inspiration from his relationship with Hugh and Maw Hamrick, who along with the rest of the Sedaris clan, and his own fear of death, provide just as much fodder for laughter, not to mention the “lost in translation” moments, from befriending a convicted sex offender in Normandy to his attempts to learn Japanese. <br/> <br/>His transition from his childhood to finding his material in his relationship with Hugh has made his writing no less funny than ever, and he is still the only person I read that I truly laugh out loud both while reading and later recounting to others. I tried to tell someone the story of his Japanese haircut and was laughing so hard I couldn’t do it. But the best part of these stories is Hughes’s added one-lines to David’s questions that fully punctuate and complete the stories. On a train in Japan he observed a man in a black suit with matching black shoes wearing canary yellow socks, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them. “Hugh, I said. “Do you think I would look good in yellow socks?” He thought for a moment before saying, “No,“ this without a trace of doubt, as if I asked if I’d look good in a body stocking.” <br/> <br/>I feel like I’ve grown up with David Sedaris and laughed my way across a few countries and continents with him and in and out of relationships. I love the transition into this new area of material that can still have us all laughing at ourselves and relationships and society in the same style and manner as his other books have but in a bit more macabre, “You are going to die, someday” sort of way, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find someone to remind you that you are going to die, who might just lance a boil for you, who might just go to Japan with you to help you quit smoking when you are “engulfed in flames”. <br/> <br/> <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/1079257?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>