A Modest Bestiary
by David Sedaris
ages: adult
First sentence: “The cat had a party to attend, and went to the baboon to get herself groomed.”
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The number one rule in reviewing is never start a review saying you don’t like the genre. You do that and people will discredit everything you say after. Except… it’s really true in this case. Satire and I, we don’t get along. I am not a fan of the literary technique, I usually don’t “get it”, and I rarely find it funny.

And yet. I “got” this book, or at least most of it. It helps that Sedaris — again, whom I’ve had a bit of a rocky relationship with; I find him hilarious in person, but I don’t think his humor translates in writing for me — is poking fun at people we all know: hairdressers, complainers, obsessive parents, liberals, conservatives, intellectuals, vigilantes; no one is safe from the Sedaris’s caricaturization.

That’s not to say that every story works equally well, and truthfully, that may have been me. I really liked the ones I “got”, especially “The Cat and the Baboon,” “The Toad, the Turtle, and the Duck,” “The Parenting Storks” (an excerpt of which I heard on NPR, which led me to pick up the book in the first place), and “The Grieving Owl”. Each of these I found hilarious in their own way; possibly because the are the most accessible, and possibly because I found them funny, knowing people like that (though don’t we all).

Sedaris also balances between humanizing these animals and keeping them in the animal world: nothing really has a happily ever after, and the viciousness is often due to the nature of the animal: a baby stork falls from its nest presumably to its death, a bear is captured and forced to be a part of a circus, the crow eats the baby lamb’s eyeballs. It’s a reminder that, no matter how pretty we try to make it, nature is a cruel, vicious place. And the moral? Nobody’s exempt, no matter what you think.

It’s a weird little collection of stories, and not for everyone. But as far as satire goes, it’s quite good.