ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY - 图书城.COM

"It's a pretty grim world when I can't even feel superior to a toddler." Welcome to the curious mind of David Sedaris, where dogs outrank children, guitars have breasts, and French toddlers unmask the inadequacies of the American male. Sedaris inhabits this world as a misanthrope chronicling all things petty and small. In Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris is as determined as ever to be nobody's hero--he never triumphs, he never conquers--and somehow, with each failure, he inadvertently becomes everybody's favorite underdog. The world's most eloquent malcontent, Sedaris has turned self-deprecation into a celebrated art form--one that is perhaps best experienced in audio. "Go Carolina," his account of "the first battle of my war against the letter s" is particularly poignant. Unable to disguise the lisp that has become his trademark, Sedaris highlights (to hilarious extent) the frustration of reading "childish s-laden texts recounting the adventures of seals or settlers named Sassy or Samuel." Including 23 of the book version's 28 stories, two live performances complete with involuntary laughter, and an uncannily accurate Billie Holiday impersonation, the audio is more than a companion to the text; it stands alone as a performance piece--only without the sock monkeys. (Running time: 5 hours, 4 cassettes)
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Daphne Durham
From Publishers Weekly
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, tooDwith helpless laughter. 16-city author tour. (June)
From Library Journal
In this collection of 27 fairly short essays, some of which appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker, Sedaris gives the impression of ease and naturalness. Whether he iswriting about overcoming a lisp, learning to play the guitar, trying to master French, or taking an IQ test, whether the locales are North Carolina, New York, or France, the author is both amused and amusing. Call what he writes essays, sketches, minor discourses, whimsicalities, reminiscences, curiosities, vignettes, chronicles, orbits of narrativeDno convenient blanket phrase covers them allDit is a testimony to his talent that he manages to infect the pieces with his geniality. They are all based on the author's own experiences and are all nicely constructed, cheerful, and absolutely not taxing on the brain. This is the sort of book from which you can read a chapter at random before turning out the lights at the end of the day. Recommended.DA.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
From AudioFile
David Sedaris's deadpan delivery is the perfect foil to the bizarre in his latest collection of essays, and it's hard to imagine another reader recounting these unlikely anecdotes. Most of the readings were recorded in a Paris studio, although some live performances are interspersed, complete with an appreciative live audience. But their easy responses, sometimes as automatic as a television sitcom's laugh track, are often more distracting than encouraging. Listeners accustomed to Sedaris's stories on Public Radio International's "This American Life" will find these readings, about his family, his early adult life, living in France and attempting to learn the language, a little less exuberant, a little more thoughtful, suffering only, perhaps, from the absence of producer Ira Glass's masterful editorial hand. The tone does seem fitting, though, for the essays slide in and out of fleeting sadness, even as they mock and self-deprecate and aim for irony. Sedaris is at his worst when glib, and his least successful essays are those that rant against modern life: New York restaurants, computers. He is at his best when he's describing the absurdity of childhood, moments so unexpectedly strange and yet recognizable, like Sedaris's boyhood dream of performing a one-man show as Billie Holiday singing commercial jingles (and he provides pitch-perfect renditions), that they prompt gleeful, giddy laughter. J.M.D. 　
　　LA Weekly Literary Supplement
　　"...celebrates its author's ability to mock himself...while wildly funny, is also moving..."
　　"Seattle Times"
　　" ...deftly navigates some unsettling subject matter...ultimately, it's his notes of rapture that leave the strongest impressions..."
　　Colorado Springs Gazette
　　"...funny, smart, and wickedly observant...but it's the other stories in which he redeems 　　...smarting pain...with searing humor where Sedaris is at his best..."
　　Boston Book Review
　　"...his brilliance resides in a capacity to surprise, associate, and disassociate, and the result is something like watching lightning strike in slow motion..."
　　Denver Post
　　"...genius lies in transforming strangeness, obsessive voyeurism and endearingly snotty observations into wildly entertaining art...he has earned a place as one of America's finest...humorists..."
　　Denver Rocky Mountain News
　　"...if wit were measured in people, Sedaris would be China...his talent is that huge...Sedaris' wit should be regulated. Experiences this enjoyable are usually illegal..."
　　The Free-Lance Star
　　"Stunning in its simplicity...one of the best novels you're likely to encounter this year...relish it."
　　Book
　　"...laugh-out-loud funny, witty, and trenchant and ver far too soon..." -