David Sedaris manages to draw humorous blood even from the bitter aspects of life

Twenty years ago, love at first sight: a Christmas elf in a department store and dishwasher at Piccadilly alongside ex-convicts on probation. David Sedaris was immediately what he would always be: right from his debut – Holydays on ice2003 – he gave us a world, his world, with frank writing and a healthy lack of mercy. “It was a sort of club of local elders, who could spend even an entire afternoon curled up on a single portion of rice pudding”, said that diner. “Families with ugly daughters don’t count for anything, I learned it early on, we all know it”, she writes today, showing that she hasn’t lost her edge. Because without healthy cruelty, without precise writing, without rhythm, humor dies. And literature also dies – buzzing Maupassant, who had all these characteristics fully developed and in fact wrote The legacya tale Sedaris would have liked because it is still a matter of family, and after all what do you want to talk about if not this permanent theatre, this stage on which neither curtain nor pitiful veil ever falls?