I have come to the conclusion that David Sedaris is not just some geeky Samuel Pepys, as I had assumed all these years. True, he may shed a revelatory light on the more extreme facets of our societal spectrum through his bizarre and pithy prism. Yes, his worldview—a fascinating hybrid of the curious, cranky and kooky—does indeed hold a mirror up to nature and show us as others see us. But make no mistake: He is not the Fool, he is Lear ... This book allows us to observe not just the nimble-mouthed elf of his previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality. Calypso chronicles his latest attempts to come to terms with the slings and arrows of truly outrageous fortune that life has flung at him ... For Lear the storm is the central metaphor ... For Sedaris a snapping turtle with a partly missing foot and a tumor on its head becomes an unlikely leitmotif ... The brilliance of David Sedaris’s writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerizing us so that his logic becomes ours ... The geeks really do inherit the earth.
Two things David Sedaris is talking about more than he used to: Donald Trump and death. The essay collection Calypso, his first in five years, finds the beloved humorist rejiggering his tone — right along with much of the country — to meet a newly somber national mood. Or maybe it’s just the shadow of late middle age: the looming reality of mortality, the increasing pervasion of funerals and illnesses and retirements in one man’s orbit. It’s hard to tell exactly from where the motivation for the shift stems. And indeed, therein lies Sedaris’ genius — he reflects the culture inwardly. Through his peculiar mind, Sedaris captures biting truths, documenting with journalistic precision his quiet public indignities and milking them for all their tragicomic worth.
He’s still someone who makes his thoughts amusing for millions of people, but his thoughts have changed. His observations have gotten crueler ... Sedaris is fascinated and repelled by people, but he needs them around to feed his clever misanthropy. Sometimes his antics seem as if they were cultivated just for the story he would share about them later ... Sedaris’s most fruitful subject, as it has been for years, is his family. It is the source of both his best humor and his deepest pathos ... When something pains Sedaris the most, he shuts down his fabulous voice and lets the stark events unfold with practically no comment, prompting readers to go back and make sure we read that horrible detail correctly ... Whether it’s a compulsion or a decision, Sedaris isn’t holding back anymore.
...firmly grounded in the present, but with the same sense of twisted nostalgia that has always marked his best work ... The best stories here are the work of a man seeking catharsis by coming to terms with tragedy the only way he knows how — storytelling. For the reader, they’re even more than that — a chance for us to know once and for all that our families aren’t nearly as messed up as we think they are.
Sedaris has always written darkly comic material, but in Calypso he doesn’t try to find humor when discussing topics like his sister’s suicide or his mother’s alcoholism. Sedaris is more introspective than he’s ever been, skipping from humorous insights about growing up as one of six children to paragraphs that see him trying to understand why his sister killed herself ... Despite presenting a more reflective version of himself, Sedaris’ sharp observational skills and bone-dry humor are as strong as ever ... Calypso is the writer’s most personal book yet, but it’s still signature Sedaris.
It has fewer laugh-out-loud moments, but feels more substantial and rewarding than some of his earlier efforts ... Sure, Sedaris’ wry voice enhances stories about his obsession with a Fitbit fitness-tracking device, fad diets, his short stature (I can relate) and the perks and pitfalls of frequent travel for his lucrative lecture tours ... But for the first time, he also addresses, poignantly, the 2013 suicide of his estranged sister Tiffany, the youngest of his five siblings ... Sedaris now reckons with [his mother's] alcoholism ... the author has described his own recollections as 'realish' ... I don’t much care what liberties Sedaris takes. But much of his writing in Calypso, especially personal reflections on his family, feels true.
He makes his readers happy ... But Sedaris also goes dark. He’s still funny, but if Calypso is reminiscent of anything, it’s grieving and then laughing in spite of ourselves ... Part of the magic of David Sedaris’s work stems from the simple truth that you really can’t laugh heartily until you’re hurting deeply. Calypso is funny precisely because so much of its subject matter is so dark. Watching our parents age and remain racist, trying to understand why a sibling killed herself, coming to terms with the state of America today and with one’s own mortality—these topics don’t often make for cheerful reading. But what happens between those big terrible moments does make for laugh-out-loud writing.
David Sedaris has never been quite so preoccupied with mortality ... But Sedaris isn't sentimental about his mortality or anyone else's, despite the shadow that lingers over Calypso — the suicide of his troubled sister Tiffany in 2013, a few weeks before her 50th birthday ... Most of Calypso is funny, of course ... The latter essay will leave you helpless with laughter. The final essay, 'The Comey Memo,' merely leaves you feeling helpless.
In contrast to Sedaris' preceding essay collections, Calypso's focus is narrow ... To read Calypso is to see in Sedaris a shift from the frustrated, sometimes grudging enjoyment of his family's foibles we're familiar with, to a more urgent realization that they're no longer young, and that they only have so much time together left on this earth. Calypso paradoxically uses this wandering, almost distracted-seeming style of storytelling within the overall themes of the book to conjure a sense of Sedaris traveling through his own thoughts, getting lost on particular charming tangents about his siblings before coming back to what he ultimately wants you to take away ... [The essays are] comedic because they're in that familiar essayistic format by noted humorist David Sedaris, but at their core they're as melancholy as anything he's ever written. The moments that make you laugh out loud are few and far between, used as a garnish rather than forming the meat of the story. The sharpness and exaggerated pettiness of his earliest books are all but gone, replaced with a gentler sort of wryness that, one assumes, comes with the wisdom of middle age and experience.
Honest, reflective and even tender, Sedaris bravely—and movingly—lists his regrets ... Interspersed with the more serious material is a virtual party of chapters about all sorts of puckish topics. Sedaris takes on politics ... He is hilarious about animals ... Eloquent and silly, Sedaris’ collection could probably find unshakable life even in the dust kitties under the bed. It’s impossible not to want to invite him to dinner to tell you stories, not to want him to be your best friend, because like all best friends, he gets you laughing even as he gently turns you toward the darkness we all must face.
Reading Calypso, Sedaris’ latest collection of essays, is like settling into a glorious beach vacation with the author, whose parents, siblings and longtime boyfriend, Hugh, feel like old friends to faithful readers ... While Sedaris is laugh-out-loud funny in his brilliant, meandering way, it’s his personal reflections that will stay with you.
These essays are less zany than his earlier work (although you’ll still laugh out loud). Instead, he has mastered the art of modulation, weaving together grief with silliness, the joys of life with the fact of death ... His best comedy is not only unserious but anti-serious, a vindication of frivolousness in a time of moral hand-wringing ... If he sometimes comes off as flippant, so what. Mr. Sedaris is a prime entertainer, and so he cannot be a moralist.
He tries to make sense of loss, mortality and aging in his brilliant new collection of essays ... mostly, these essays, which are laugh-out-loud funny, true and introspective, are about the Sedaris family and how, 'at this particular moment of our lives, no one belonged together more than us.'
Calypso is the most family-centered of his books yet and, although much of it is very funny, it’s also his most melancholy as it addresses aging and loss ... Calypso ranges across a number of other subjects as well, often with Sedaris’ trademark off-center, self-deprecating humor ... But most of the essays deal in one way or another with his family. Sometimes they’re mordantly funny ... But many of them deal, with grief and insight, with his sister and mother ... it’s clear where Sedaris’ storytelling skills come from. 'Her specialty was the real-life story, perfected and condensed,' he writes [of his mother]. "These take work, and she’d go through half a dozen verbal drafts before getting one where she wanted it. Over the course of the day the line she wished she’d delivered in response to some question or comment — the zinger — would become the line she had delivered." That functions perfectly as a description of what Sedaris does when he shapes real experiences into his stories.
The 21 entries in Sedaris' winning new collection — not quite half of which are previously unpublished — are now called stories as opposed to personal essays ... Sedaris demonstrates yet again what makes him the best American humorist writing today: A remarkable ability to combine the personal with the political, the mundane with the profane, slime with the sublime, and hilarity with heart.Reading Sedaris' family stories is like tuning into a spectacularly well-written sit-com.
Sedaris’ family and upbringing have long been mainstays in his work, but this collection encompasses perhaps his most tender writing on the subjects yet ... For readers concerned that Sedaris has become too reverent, there’s also an episode in which he seeks connection with a tortoise via hilariously head-scratching means. Readers may think they know what to expect from Sedaris; they’ll be both surprised and delighted.
Sedaris is practically his own genre now. You probably already know whether you like his wry, well-shaped, almost-true stories from his own life ... It was jarring, after the fun and funny time we'd had, to hear Sedaris report someone else's personal details in front of a huge audience. Without the craft or consideration that goes into writing, or the essayist's implied promise that this will be meaningful, it felt like we'd been handed an old man's dignity for our own entertainment. Or maybe Sedaris', since he also mentioned that he likes to tell audiences that he has broken up with his husband (he hasn't) to get the shocked reaction ... Whether it's a compulsion or a decision, Sedaris isn't holding back anymore.
Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters ... But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals. Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
Throughout, Sedaris reveals a deep loyalty to family, with loving reminiscences of his mother, a palpable wish to be closer to his father, and a nostalgic devotion to his siblings and their shared memories. The author’s fans and newcomers alike will be richly rewarded by this sidesplitting collection.
Calypso immediately goes for the literary gold, jumping into the Sedaris family’s complicated dynamics, and the author’s difficulty dealing with his sister Tiffany’s suicide. Splitting his time between Sussex, England — where he lives with his partner Hugh — and Emerald Isle, North Carolina, Sedaris finally organizes the family gathering everyone wants. Except, this time, everyone is older, their father nearing a century, their mother has passed away from cancer, and their sister, Tiffany, is no longer part of the gang ... As a first-time Sedaris reader, I understand why I was drawn to this particular book and why his work is so important — why, as a gay man, it’s vital for me to read works by members of the community who choose not to let their sexuality define them and who, instead of assenting to mainstream expectations, choose to understand themselves merely as human and finite.
In Calypso, Sedaris continues to draw on many of the themes of his earlier works, but the mood is darker. His family is now older. He and his siblings, he says at the start of the book, are now in their fifties. It is, he adds, 'just a matter of time before our luck runs out and one of us gets cancer'. When he invites his three sisters, Gretchen, Lisa and Amy, to spend Christmas with him and his partner, Hugh, in the home they share in Sussex, it feels like a 'last hurrah'. His description of their visit is, as always, extremely funny, a layering of anecdote, musing and memory, one you could easily call an essay ... Throughout this collection, Sedaris moves seamlessly between past and present, observation and anecdote, embarrassing revelation and moments of poignancy that sometimes make you gasp ... although there are moments when he seems to be pushing too hard for the easy gag, and when he could get more impact by ramping down instead of up ... But the odd lapse into hyperbole won’t mar the pleasure of this incredibly funny and sometimes moving meditation on love, death and family life, by a master of his craft.
Did Thurber’s grandfather believe the civil war was still on, four decades after it ended? When police came to the family home one night, did the old man shoot at one of them, taking him for a deserter from the Union army? I sure hope so, but I’m not inclined to worry one way or another. Did Sedaris have a benign tumour cut out of his side in an at-home operation by a nurse he had just met — and then feed the tumour to a snapping turtle? I will not rule it out, or waste any time checking ... There is lots of funny writing in which mortally serious matters play a role. This was certainly true of Thurber. But the hard stuff usually appeared behind a comic mask or draped in a nostalgic cloak. In Calypso, Sedaris allows tragedy to appear only briefly, but without costume, playing itself. It feels like an experiment. I am keen to see where it leads.
Sedaris’s stories are as funny as ever, but his diary-essays also confront tragedy, politics and depression ... his collections of wry, sidelong diary-essays have sold in their millions around the world, and his regular TV and radio appearances and sell-out reading tours have garnered him legions of fans. Devotees are well acquainted by now with the wider Sedaris clan. His smart, adoring, yarn-spinning mother, who died in 1991; his father, distant and reactionary though softening at the edges as he ages; his clutch of wayward, wise-cracking siblings, against whom he measures himself, and on whom he relies. They’re the animating force behind his writing; the wellspring of his humour, the source of his grace.
