For those of you who know David Sedaris (like him or not) you know the kind of writer he is: sometimes dark, always funny, quirky, and cynical. This book hits all of his best writing qualities. The stories made me go from laugh out loud one minute, to sick and oddly disturbed the next. Imagine if Aesop's Fables and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales had a baby; it would be this book. Morality fables with a hint the rude, crude, ridiculous, and at times disgusting.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a series of morality stories from the perspective of animals, ranging from sadistic acts, casual racism, selfishness, adultery, egotism, to fad spiritualism and so on. Their character aspects and flaws are not too far from humans (and in fact seem to embodied the most base characteristics of humans). David Sedaris does a wonderful job of showing a world with very different social aspects and obligations, making the stories even more interesting. He manages to take the human world and morph it to fit the animal realm perfectly. I really wonder how he, along with the other authors of this book, Elaine Stritch, Dylan Baker, and Siân Phillips, came up with these strange and absurd little stories?
At first I wasn't sure what to think of this book, it was quite entertaining, but having come from the previous book I read by him, Me Talk Pretty One Day, it was quite a shock. The book has a very dark, cynical tone to it, yet there were times when I almost cried laughing and some parts that were so disgusting I didn't want to go on. I may have mixed emotions about this book, but from a literary aspect it is like nothing I have ever read, so for those of you looking for something funny, wild, strange, slightly disturbing, and outside of any normal notion of what a novel is, I say this book is for you!
This is a little slide show of some of the Illustrations from the book, just to give you an idea of what some of the stories might be about!
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