Book Reviews

Me Talk Pretty One Day

Little, Brown, and Co., 224 pp., $22.95

Thanksgiving with David Sedaris must be something else. There's his father, the math-obsessed geek who squirrels away everything -- rotten figs, limp carrots -- for his dinner. There's the youngest Sedaris, Paul, prone to such dinner conversation as, "Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the rooster." Then there's his actress sister Amy (also the star of Comedy Central's Strangers With Candy), a chameleon with a fondness for fake teeth and fat-suits. And don't forget the bestselling humorist himself, bristling with his own tics and foibles and obsessions (hates the Internet, loves One Life to Live), who has spun all their experiences into his latest collection of brief, blunt, and hilarious stories about life and the oddballs who populate it.

Fans of Sedaris' Naked will not be disappointed by Me Talk Pretty One Day, a natural extension of that book's take on the gloriously bizarre Sedaris pedigree. But when Sedaris moves to France with his boyfriend midway through the book, it results in his most sidesplitting work to date. The three stories chronicling Sedaris' time in Paris -- "See You Again Yesterday," "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and "Jesus Shaves" -- are painfully funny fish-out-of-water tales about the difficulty of learning the language and the near-impossibility of translating the culture. Sedaris delineates the absurd situation of a smart man thrust into a foreign environment, armed only with the word for "bottleneck." Things go from bad to worse when our hero, desperate to learn French, enrolls in a language course. Taught by a bloodthirsty sadist, the class is reduced to tears and only a spotty vocabulary with which to express themselves. "Much work and someday you talk pretty," a classmate explains to the forlorn author. "People stop hate you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay." I am a stoic reader, who rarely raises more than a half-cocked grin when something is funny. But the simple, effortless comic build of these stories had me howling in the airport, my hands shaking, my eyes glistening with tears. Concerned passersby craned their necks to see what the fuss was about; airport security stiffened. But I simply read on, tears streaking my face, my stomach starting to ache with laughter, as everyone stared. Which is, I'm sure, exactly as David Sedaris would like it.