BOOK REVIEW | Calypso by David Sedaris | Little Brown.

Calypso by David Sedaris, 2018

At this point, blogging a review of anything by David Sedaris feels pretty presumptuous. Like, who the fuck am I to “review” this dude? He’s a king. A literary celebrity. I’m nobody.

But whatever!

As I’ve been working (and working, and working) to update my website, putting up pages and pages of old content, I’ve realized that book reviewing is something I’ve missed in my life. And I’ve resolved to get back to it, since I still read a lot. Why the fuck shouldn’t I?

Anyway! Calypso is great.

It’s a light and fast read (I finished in just a couple of hours) and the essays within are tight, touching, and funny (as Sedaris almost always is, though rarely in a laugh-out-loud way). I think of it as fairly subtle humour, laced with tears. AV Club calls it “Sedaris’ warmest, darkest book to date” and they’re not wrong.

It is perhaps worth noting that you can read nearly all of the essays in Calypso on the New Yorker website (you get a few free reads a month if you’re not a subscriber). And as a result, I’d actually already read a number of the essays in this collection. This was a little disappointing. I wish more of the content had been original, but then again, I think at least for most readers, it will be.

For me, highlights included recent stuff about Trump being elected (as in the essay “A Number of Reasons I’ve Been Depressed Lately”).

I especially enjoyed a bit of the book where he describes jokingly making light of the election results to a long-term friend via email, and either not realizing he’s kidding, or perhaps because she can’t stomach it, she blocks him. And I loved the small peeks into Sedaris’ long-time domestic relationship with Hugh Hamrick. (I don’t know why I am so nosy about the love lives of celebrities, but I am. I just want to know what shit is really like for them. It’s shameful, really. I know it’s none of my business.)

In the book’s first essay, “Company Man” (which is sort of about having guests and guest rooms), there’s a great mini anecdote about the couple having a fight in an airport.

Apparently they were arguing about which security line was moving quickest. Sedaris reports that Hamrick hissed at him, “I haven’t liked you since 2002”,  which for some reason, cracked me up. A literal (rare) lol, if you will. He goes on to say:

“This didn’t hurt me so much as confuse me. ‘What happened in 2002?’ I asked. On the plane, he apologized, and a few weeks later, when I brought the airport incident up over dinner, he claimed to have no memory of it.”

I recently read a bit of a whole article that questions the happiness of the Sedaris/Hamrick union. It was a whole bunch of weird, speculative bullshit. If you’ve ever been in a truly long-term relationship and you can’t relate to this “I haven’t liked you since” anecdote, you are either a robot or a liar and either way, I don’t trust you. If anything, this is the kind of thing that proves to me that a couple is real, and likely, pretty happy over all. It’s the couples who only project smooth-sailing bliss that you should probably be suspicious of.

The bottom line is that Calypso really is a lovely little read.

I know I’m a nobody, so who cares what I think, but it’s the sort of book I would recommend to a friend, to a stranger, to my very picky Dad. It’s just good. It makes a return to Sedaris’ signature essay style, which I had been missing. And while I borrowed the copy I read from the library, I’ll certainly be buying one to keep on my shelf.

Calypso by David Sedaris, published by Little Brown, was released on May 29, 2018.

Here’s my review of Sedaris’ diaries, released last year.

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