Animals
play all the parts in David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, published in 2010.
The characters are skillfully anthropomorphized and often find
themselves jammed up in ways most humans can recognize.
But these animals are
not just substitutes for people. They are nameless as strays and
stock, and the reader rarely forgets these characters face animal fates—the farmer’s
axe, the researcher’s hypodermic needle, the law of the jungle.
I have read several Sedaris collections and had decided I much preferred his autobiographical pieces, so I was surprised
at how much I liked these sixteen shorts of humor and heart worms—and the
accompanying animal illustrations by Ian Falconer.
I enjoyed a 2010 Little, Brown,
and Company hardcover copy with patient, spacious type and thick-stock pages.
