Calypso (2018) by David Sedaris: Sedaris is an extraordinarily gifted comic writer whose observations about family, life, and the FitBit in this volume often move into an understated poignance that never becomes mawkish or overly flippant. The comic essays included here (no short stories this time around) appeared between 2016 and 2018.
The adventures of his family and himself go into some dark places here, including the suicide of a sister whom Sedaris and his siblings (there are six Sedaris children in total) have been avoiding because of exhaustion for years... in David's case, eight. He never lets himself off the hook. He also never loses his almost-trademarked gift at portraying the absurd moments of almost any event, any person.
Most notably himself.
A sequence involving a snapping turtle, a beach house, and a non-cancerous fatty tumour on Sedaris' stomach really has to be read. Maybe with a bit of vomit coming up in one's mouth from time to time. Sedaris doesn't spare us his misadventures in stomach flu, falling off ladders on Christmas Day, and failing to interact in a meaningful way with his emotionally distant and physically and mentally declining nonagenarian father.
I think it's all pretty much dandy, the sort of humour that supplies catharsis and belly-laughs. It's not his finest collection of humourous essays -- that would probably be When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008). But it's a lot of sometimes serious fun. Calypso will certainly delight longtime readers of Sedaris, and it also serves as a fine introduction to his work. Highly recommended.
Sandman: The Dream Hunters: adapted by P. Craig Russell from a novella by Neil Gaiman and Yoshiaka Amano (2009): Writer-artist Russell adapted Neil Gaiman's illustrated 1999 Sandman novella into comic-book form to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first issue of Gaiman's hyper-popular Sandman series. The novella itself was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sandman. What will the 30th anniversary bring?
Told as if it were an old Japanese folk story (it isn't, though Gaiman's afterword to the 1999 novella convinced a lot of people, including Russell, that it was), The Dream Hunters chronicles the adventures of a female fox, a young monk, and a magician searching for a cure for his chronic fear. It's set in a legendary Japan of animal spirits, demons, and witches. The Sandman himself -- Dream, or Morpheus -- plays a supporting role, as he periodically did in his own comic-book series. The narrative focus is squarely upon the fox and the monk.
Russell's art is pleasingly legendary in its own way, as sometimes cartoony and sometimes nightmarish demons rub shoulders with realistically rendered humans, a slightly anthropomorphic fox, and some truly horrible witches. Or are they oracles? Russell's faces are always expressive, that expressiveness the product of just a few lines properly placed.
The colouring by Lovern Kindzierski apparently tries to replicate the palette available to Japanese print-makers of a certain era. It's a lovely, muted wash of pastels and faded primary colours. Much of the wording remains Gaiman's, but Russell has done a fine job of selecting what to keep in language and what to render as art. All in all, this is a marvelous addition to the Sandman library, and worth owning whether or not one already has the novella. Highly recommended.
