Naked (1997)

Fresh on the heels of listening to Calypso by David Sedaris, I went back in time to a collection of his essays published in 1997 entitled Naked. This is a very short audiobook coming in at just over 3 hours and I got through it quite quickly.

Sedaris' caustic humour is back, as are the family interactions and dynamics. David Sedaris' sister Amy was involved in recording the audiobook and acts out some of the dialogue mentioned in the stories. I imagine this would have been a terrific collaboration between the two siblings (Amy is an actor) however the volume of her contributions were way too loud and jarringly contrasted with her brother's smooth delivery. As a consequence, I found myself regularly adjusting the volume and being taken out of the stories each time she spoke.

The title essay (Naked) is a story about the author's weekend stay at a nudist colony and was very enjoyable. I'm still enjoying Sedaris' sardonic take on the world and am listening to Me Talk Pretty One Day next. ( )

Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview—a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing.

Sedaris is always a delight. Makes me more judgy and bitchy during/after I read but I actually think it's better this way. ( )

Naked by David Sedaris (1998)

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. This isn't a typical read for me; this selection was governed by my Book Club. I'm not used to fiction without at least a few elements of wizardry, dragons, or gratuitous sex and violence.

Naked is a collection of short autobiographical stories following a young man and his atypical experiences with his family, friends, and coworkers. While it may sound banal, the stories were over-the-top enough to be thoroughly entertaining but somehow did not strain credulity. Characters were vivid; I could HEAR the senile angry grandmother, the resentful clockmaker, the wise nudist. The narrator was especially genuine. David captured the thought process of a teenager perfectly: The martyr complex, the daydreaming, the insight, the boldness, and the terrible, terrible decision-making skills. He is not a perfect person, or even a great person, but he tries. I feel compelled to point out that the main character is gay. This plays, understandably, a huge part in his life stories, but is not the focus of the novel.

I struggled for a long time with the meaning of the text. While its a short story collection, it follows a timeline and there is some overlap between tales. However, it still lacks a goal, an arc. Reading fantasy, a genre defined by epic quests and comprised nearly entirely of allegory and metaphor, has trained me altogether wrongly to interpret this novel. Despite this, I was able to appreciate the themes on judging and evaluating people and found them refreshingly deep for a novel that is this humorous.

The novel breezed along, sporting both a short length and a light style befitting its facetious nature.

TL;DR: Surprisingly good and short enough its no big loss if you hate it. ( )