Ratings89
Average rating4.1
David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book. If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself. With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny--it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future. This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet--and it just might be his very best.
Reviews with the most likes.
Sedaris loses one rating star for not enough original material. Half of these essays were published in The New Yorker over the past few years.
Though I normally like to listen to the audio version so he can tell me his stories, I grabbed Liz's library copy before she returned it, but then had to keep interrupting her while reading to ask, “Where have we read this before?” There are a few of the stories that I know I've already read word for word and many that feel very deja vu, enough that I kept checking the copyright date to see if this was somehow an older work that I was accidentally re-reading. Even with that, he still lands a few perfect laugh-out-loud and need-to-repeat-them lines, but maybe now I've reached peak Sedaris saturation.
Absolutely wonderful, but then I'm a fan so I would say that. And I do think that being a fan of his other works, or at least having read them, is important with this book; it is another layer of his family's relationships and without the previous books you just won't get it, all the weirdo-technicolor-vibrancy. As a first David Sedaris book it will be entertaining, but if it's your second-third-eighth then it will knock you on your ass. Highly recommend.