something about David Sedaris’s "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk"

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.

 

something about Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of the Jackal”

I watched “Carlos,” an excellent movie about the infamous international terrorist for hire, Carlos the Jackal. Carlos was a Venezuelan Marxist named Ilich Ramirez Sanchez; the recruiter in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine code-named Ramirez Sanchez "Carlos" because of his South American roots; then The Guardian began referring to him as Carlos the Jackal after one of its correspondents supposedly saw the fugitive with a copy of the novel, The Day of the Jackal.

So the movie led me to read that 1971 fictional thriller. The novel, written by English author and journalist Frederick Forsyth, is about a professional assassin contracted by a French dissident paramilitary organization to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France. The book covers the organization’s history of failed attempts; its subsequent activities and hiring of the assassin; the assassin’s meticulous planning and preparations; and the Government of France’s work to protect the President, foil the dissident organization, and identify and catch the assassin. Forsyth trusts his reader and includes a lot of wonderful details and characters. The result is an especially satisfying read.

Notes:

• Carlos the Jackal is now serving a life sentence in France. One of his most notorious crimes was his 1975 raid on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna; three people died during that attack and several OPEC oil ministers were kidnapped.
  

• The 2010 film “Carlos” has a good soundtrack and an excellent performance by Edgar Ramírez, who plays Carlos as a man whose reputation precedes and probably exceeds him.