squirrel seeks chipmunk

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


David Sedaris always makes me laugh to tears, and even though this book did not exactly have that effect on me, I still enjoyed reading his "fables" (he prefers to call them animal tales because he says that fables have morals and he doesn't) and discovering what Sedaris can do when he ventures into the fiction territory. The format of the book was very appealing, enriched with illustrations by Ian Falconer, author and illustrator of Olivia (one of my favorite children's books), which provided a kind of creepy contrast to some of the darker tales.
My favorite stories were the one about the squirrel and the chipmunk and the one about the owl and the hippopotamus. In the fist one, a squirrel and a chipmunk go on a date and the chipmunk, who doesn't know what jazz is, tells the squirrel that she enjoys it too for fear of sounding ignorant but is then terrified by the possibility that jazz is something horrible: "The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? 'Oh, I like it too,' she'd said -and so eagerly! Then again, if could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more terrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infested flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide. And she had claimed to like it!"
The last story of the book is about a grieving owl, whose thirst for knowledge, love for awkwardness, and acceptance of unlikely friendships "so far-fetched they simply had to be true" reminded me a lot of myself and made me smile long after I finished reading the book.



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