Naked
Posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 6:37 am
Product Description
A riotous collection of memoirs which explores the absurd hilarity of modern life and creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedaris from his humiliating bout with obsessive behaviour in ‘A Plague of Tics’ to the title story, where he is finally forced to face his naked self in the company of lunatics. At this soulful and moving moment, he brushes cigarette ashes from his pubic hair and wonders what it all means. This remarkable journey into his own life follows a path of self- effacement and a lifelong search for identity leaving himself both under suspicion and over dressed.Amazon.com Review
Hip radio comedy fans and theater folks who belong to the cult of Obie-winning playwright/performer David Sedaris must kill to get this book. These would be fans of the scaldingly snide Sedaris’s hilariously described personal misadventures like The Santaland Diaries (a monologue about his work as an elf to a department store Santa) seen off-Broadway in 1997. In a series of similarly textured essays, Sedaris takes us along on his catastrophic detours through a nudist colony, a fruit-packing plant, his own childhood, and a dozen more of the world’s little purgatories.
After having enjoyed “Take the Canoli” (Sarah Vowell), I thought I would stick with the NPR storytelling genre, and bought this book as it was on the Amazon’s “also bought” list.
Written auto-biographically, Sedaris describes the nightmare of his childhood, as well as the nighmare of a child he must have been to his parents. He describes in detail his childhood obsessive compulsive behaviors, like screaming unexplicably in class, compulsive rocking, listening the same pop tunes hundreds of times, the need to smash his nose up agaisnt window glass when he was in a car, and how he had to count each step on the way home from school (with assorted rituals along the way, like opening doors with his elbows. This was a messed up kid. (or the fiction of a deranged person). I did not find it funny at all — it was distrubing.
He also talks about his family including a father so obsessed with getting his kids to take up golf, that he finds it more important to keep the author and his sister at a professional golf event, than to deal with his daughter’s first menstruation. Sick parent. Sick kid.
I put down the book about 1/3 of the way through, when he reveals his alternate sexual preference. For those of us who want to believe that such is a choice/preference of otherwise normal healthy people, this book disturbs that notion. I will share this book with no one — I think I will throw it away.
Rating: 1 / 5
An annoying disjointed book. I didn’t enjoy reading it. The author jumps from one bad anecdote to another. How this is humor beats me!
Rating: 1 / 5
This book was absolutely disgusting. I could NOTHING redeeming about his family. He is a much too tortured soul to enjoy hearing his inner most thoughts! I love to read to escape reality and this book smears my nose in it over and over again!
Rating: 1 / 5
I only listened to 10 minutes of David Sedaris’ book “Naked” on tape before shutting it off. I don’t find obsessive/compulsive behavior comical, which is what the main character of the first “humorous” essay clearly displayed. Sorry, but mental illness isn’t funny to me. Treatable, yes; funny, no. Thankfully, I rented this tape from the library, so I didn’t waste money on it. I couldn’t give “0 stars” in this review, or I would have done so.
Rating: 1 / 5
I have yet to laugh. The humor is the sick and annoying type that I cannot stand from human beings much less from a book. Half the time I am waiting for the climax, but instead hit the plateau that the book has been riding on since page 1. I bought this book with all of its overwhelming reviews, but it is entirely disapointing. Plan to sell it off as soon as I can….buyers?
Rating: 1 / 5