The Book Tower

In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren’t enough euros to go round. “The entire EU is short on coins.”
And I say, “Really?” because there are plenty of them in Germany. I’m never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian casiers, who are, in a word, lazy.

When you are Engulfed in Flames is my introduction to the writing of David Sedaris. This is a collection of loosely connected autobiographical pieces, and the writing has a neat line in self deprecating humour and is full of excellent observations on the everday; it’s the kind of writing I suspect we all aspire to. It’s also the sort of thing you’d expect to find in the pages of the New Yorker, prose that’s as well crafted and nourishing as a good and wholesome meal.

His sixth publication, I’m late to the Sedaris world. His pieces come across as very compact, well-constructed short stories, although this book is officially categorised as autobiography. Sedaris is best when writing about himself and his view of the world; his Greek heritage, upbringing, life as a writer and its odd encounters, addictions, his homosexuality. He also touches on death and all it threatens, a subject he cannot help veering towards. There are also two hilarious accounts of airline travel, where in one he manages to deposit a sucked throat lozenge on a sleeping woman’s lap, and in another he sits beside a weeping, and ultimately irritating, man. The best however is the last section of the book, The Smoking Section, where Sedaris moves to Tokyo for three months in an attempt to give up smoking and to learn Japanese. He only succeeds with one of these goals. This was a highly enjoyable book that I polished off in two days. I look forward to more of his musings.