Nude (novel)
Nude is a collection of 17 short stories by David Sedaris that was published in New York in 1997 and soon became a bestseller . In his stories Sedaris deals with experiences from his family and other life, which, as he writes in a preliminary remark, "really happened" between childhood and adult life after college . He describes the strange sides of his Greek grandmother, his golfing father, his siblings and the people he meets in high school , while hitchhiking and doing odd jobs. But above all, he shows himself off with his tics and illusions about life and presents himself as the funniest person of his entire acquaintance.
Narrative
The stories are largely independent in terms of content, but follow a chronological sequence from childhood to the time after graduation, from attending a church service en famille to attempted masturbation in a nudist camp. Many stories consist of chains of small humorous situations, some of the stories also run towards punchlines , which underline the surprise and comedy with their final turns. For example in the story about the "Christmas whore", in which on the birthday of his sister, who is supposedly never capable of deeper thought, just before Christmas, it is revealed that she does her temporary job as a social worker professionally. Or the one about his odd jobs (“Something for everyone”) when he is caught putting back money stolen from a colleague . Overall, however, the structure is that of a number revue and not that of a development of the first-person narrator.
The majority of the stories arise from the ironic, funny and also crudely formulated observation of his contemporaries: "You could grow out of your clothes if you waited for my father to pick you up." Or: "The man in the nudist colony sounded like like he's been naked for years. Even his voice was tanned by the sun. " The most frequent victim of his comments, however, is himself, his appearance, his tics, his naive notions of how the world works, which vanish in smoke through a firework of self-irony: " I was a smartass; Born a smart-ass and raised a smart-ass . ” And as far as his plans, which fail because of so many little things, the narrator sums up: “ My story is a story of the almost. ”
interpretation
Humor , Freud once wrote, is also the attempt of the individual not to let the insults of life get near him . Some sentences seem to reveal a great vulnerability, as in the original tone and without a humor couverture. For example, when he describes how his mother amuses his teachers on her lawsuit visits by parodying him, and then, as a master of exaggeration, comments on the exaggeration: “Her reflections have been collected and ((by her)) presented as part of a number that bore little resemblance to our real life. ” The observation of how the lack of demarcation between his father and the narrator's grandmother almost broke the family shows a sense of humor bordering on desperation and a deep love for his cancer-dying mother.
In one of his stories there is a character who personifies this precarious interplay of outside and inside: a pantomime that makes children laugh and who has been wearing an orthopedic collar under his coat since a car accident. Sedaris' humor is the sound of his tears drying up.