Amurph11′s CBRIII Review #2 – Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, by David Sedaris

I’m sorry for being the person that reviews a David Sedaris book. I am. I recognize that a) every white yuppie under the age of 50 loves David Sedaris, which, by the way, does not make him any less awesome. But I also recognize that b) there’s not a whole lot to say about his books. They’re fucking hilarious. They make you laugh until you cry, and then actually cry when they occasionally verbally clothespin you with an unexpectedly devastating scene. There is not a single book of his I haven’t read and loved, but that’s not the point – the point is you already know all of this, if you’re the sort of person who reads a blog about books.

But here’s the thing: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is not your average David Sedaris book. It’s really fucking weird, for one thing. For another, it’s….well, it’s entirely about animals. Which is not to say that if you don’t like animals, you won’t like this book. In fact you probably will, because the portrait it paints of animals is almost entirely negative. Aside from a few martyrs, the inhabitants of Sedaris’ animal kingdom are total assholes. There’s a passive-aggressive Cow, and a pity-seeking Bear. The title Chipmunk inhibited by the expectations of her overbearing Chipmunk family. There’s a weirdly slutty Parrot of questionable journalistic ethics, and a mildly racist Duck. In fact, about the only animal I remember fondly is a somewhat socially awkward Owl. If you were going to boil the book down to its most basic ingredients, you could say that it’s an attempt to turn our society’s tendency for anthropomorphism on its head. And in that attempt, it would completely succeed. When people devote time to wondering what their animals are thinking, what they really want to know is what their animals think about them. In Sedaris’ imagination, though, they have plenty on their mind besides humans – the animal world, as it turns out, is one of complex social interactions and petty annoyances, and in most ways completely indistinguishable from our own, except for the fact that the aforementioned petty annoyances are settled more primitively. You know – with fangs, and claws.

That’s more of a justification then the book really needs, though. A likelier explanation is that this is just the kind of shit David Sedaris sees in his head when he watches squirrels and chipmunks run around in the backyard, and he thinks its funny. The question is, will everybody else find it funny? Honestly, reading the book you get the feeling he doesn’t really care either way. A love of Sedaris, in this case, will probably not guarantee that you will love this  book. It has a peculiar, precise sort of humor that not everybody will respond to . But I found it hilarious, and, like all David Sedaris books, attempted to read large sections of it aloud to those around me so that they could partake in the hilarity. As it turns out, the humor doesn’t really translate as much verbally, as least not when it’s being verbalized by me, in between maniacal giggles.

But – as it turns out, this just may be the best part of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: it makes for SUPER awkward readings. I’m not exactly sure why this is. It’s not so much that they are especially lurid stories (though some of them are). It’s just that 99% of the humor is derived from weirdly specific and completely discomfiting human situations, which are rendered deeply hilarious and even more awkward by the inclusion of animals as main characters. My boyfriend’s aunt decided to read one aloud at Christmas dinner, and the result was so squirmily uncomfortable that it could have been a scene in the book itself (and this is a family that had a frank discussion of dog fellatio during dinner. I can’t imagine how my considerably more conservative family would have reacted). It did lead into the always-fascinating conversation of what animal we would all be (we concluded that I would be a mongoose, while my boyfriend would be a beaver), and during the whole exchange, the two actual animals present looked on bemusedly: our doleful basset hound Murray, and the aforementioned Aunt’s Chihahua-German Shepherd mix, who is without question the most neurotic dog I’ve ever met. I wonder what they were thinking.

Amurph11′s CBR-III Review #1 – City of Thieves

City of Thieves, by David Benioff

Apart from Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which I’ll get to, City of Thieves is the first book I read this year. I’m not sure why this is, aside from the obvious fact that it was one of many books I received for Christmas. Probably, it’s because it was the only book I had on hand that had to do even marginally with World War II, and by extension, the Holocaust.

An aside: I have read almost every fictional book written about the Holocaust and World War II. I have also been to almost every Holocaust memorial, not on purpose, but that’s another story. Anyway the point is, after a particular war has been plumbed for all of its atrocities, and all of those atrocities have been disassembled and sifted through for every spare epiphany or profundity about humanity (and lack thereof), you get to the point as a society where there is really nothing new to say. And yet, people keep writing about it. I don’t have a problem with this – everybody has their own war, their own Big One, the one they can’t get away from. You could do worse than a World War.

Having said this – City of Thieves is no real exception. It has nothing particularly new to say about its subject matter, which is about World War II and more specifically the siege of Leningrad. Despite this – or actually probably because of it – it is still well worth a read.

The best thing I can say about City of Thieves is that it reads like a movie. Probably this sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it’s not. It is, in fact, the reason I chose it for my first CBR review – as a five year lurker, I feel that I can say with some level of authority that this is right up Pajiba’s collective alley (that is so many innuendos in one phrase). Like the best movies (and unlike almost every single of David Benioff’s screenwriting credits), it’s pacing is incredibly tight. Unlike most novels, there is not one word sacrificed to the Literary Gods of Pretension. Not for Benioff is throwing out random combinations of 4+ syllable words, in the hopes of being the first guy to coin a new metaphor. Every single word is used in service of the plot, the characters, and the environment. The end result is a spare but lively portrait, no mean feat when you consider that the setting is an incredibly depressing period from a history that is already bleak at best.

The major source of levity comes from Kolya, the wisecracking Aryan foil to our straight man, Lev Beniov. Lev and Kolya meet in a prison cell, where they have been brought in for looting and deserting, respectively. Both assume they will be executed in the morning, though it’s a conceit we never fully buy, partly because it’s only fifteen pages into the book, and partly because it paints the Russian prison system as distinctively half-assed. Sure enough, come morning, both of their asses are busted out of jail by a Colonel with a craving for eggs.

Kolya and Lev are dispatched with the strict instructions to track down a dozen eggs in time for the wedding of the Colonel’s daughter, less than a week hence. And such is the predicator for what becomes sort of a half caper comedy, half buddy war movie, a winding, not-always-totally-sensible plot that takes us through a variety of landscapes, most of them snowy. But the plot isn’t actually what’s important here (it almost never is). What makes City of Thieves worth reading is the dialogue between the two main characters – Kolya and Lev are sort of like a wartime version of Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, if Steve Martin were Jewish and John Candy was incredibly attractive. The other reason to pay the price of admission is the narrative itself – it has a way, like all my favourite books do, of flowing quickly along and then stopping you up short on a sentence of subtle but complete devastation. I’m the kind of person who keeps track of these nuggets of profundity, and I found three in City of Thieves worth writing down:

“The cold killed him. I just saw him falling.”

“I want peace, he thinks to himself late at night. I want peace. But then he dreams of fistfights.”

And the last – by far the most devastating, in context: “Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.”

City of Thieves isn’t perfect. Like a lot of solid war movies, it is ultimately pretty forgettable, and its central conceit will either take you out of the story or disappoint you afterwards, depending on how gullible you are. It’s the kind of book you’re going to lend out and then eventually lose track of, not the kind of book you’re going to hoard away in your room so no one can find it and borrow it. But, the first time you read it, it’s everything a good book should be: thrilling, funny, occasionally devastating, with the kind of ending you mistake for happy before you realize that there really are no happy endings, at least not in books about World War II (or any war, really). The minute you finish it, you’ll want to do two things: tell the entire plot as close to verbatim as possible to whoever is nearest you, and then, after you’ve ruined it for them, make them borrow it so they can share in your enthusiasm.  Not bad for the first – or technically second – book of the New Year.

The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said

….to talk of many things. Mostly books, though.