This is Fresh Air.
I'm Terry Gross.
For over three decades, beloved humorist David Sedaris has chronicled the absurdities of modern life, including his own.
He got his start writing about his short tenure at Macy's as Crumpet, a Santa Land elf, in an essay titled The Santa Land Diaries.
When he first read the essay on NPR's morning edition back in 1992, it generated more tape requests than any other story in the show's history to that point and turned him into an overnight sensation.
He since published several best-selling collections of personal essays, been awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.
His latest book of personal essays, The Land and Its People, casts Sedaris in several roles devout brother, itinerant traveler, grieving friend and reluctant caretaker.
Sedaris, who is now 69, writes.
David Sedaris spoke with guest interviewer Sam Fregoso, host of the interview podcast Talk Easy.
David Sedaris, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much, Sam.
Your latest collection of essays, The Land and Its People, are pieces you've been reading on tour around the country, I think for the last four or five years.
Does performing these pieces in front of an audience help you make them better?
Yes, the audience is my first editor and they tell me everything I need to know.
One of the new pieces I wrote.
I was talking about how frustrating it is to be in line behind someone who's buying lottery tickets.
I just hate it when you get there and then the person in front of you is like, no, that's 19-3-3-6.
On my deathbed.
I'm going to want all that time back that I spent standing behind people buying lottery tickets.
And when the audience let's say, for instance, when they cough they tell me that I need to cut whatever it is that I'm reading.
Or, of course, when they laugh, that's fantastic.
But I don't mind a groan.
A collective groan is fine with me.
You know, that kind of horrified sound.
That's all fine with me.
I mean, there are different laughs, too.
You know, there's a laugh of shock and there's a laugh of recognition.
And there's a laugh that says, I shouldn't be laughing at this, but look, I am.
So...
And I can gauge them.
You know, I've just been doing this for so long.
I can gauge it.
And then, like sometimes, if you have well, try it again next time, I said, and then you change it to I said try it again next time, then it'll work.
So...
If I have the opportunity to have the audience in front of me.
I don't want to read anything the same way twice in a row.
I want to take the opportunity to change that word.
There's something I'm working on.
I've been reading out loud and it's a crow and it would be the name of a crow, right?
Like I determine the crow's name.
And so I thought, I've been going with Scott, but then I changed it.
And Scott gets a huge laugh.
And then I tried, oh, Thomas.
Thomas would work.
And then I tried Thomas, and it got nothing.
Why is Scott...
A good name for a crow and Thomas not.
I can't tell you, but it's interesting to swap that out every night.
When you're out of town and you're away from Hugh –
Does your writing routine change at all when you're in all these different cities?
Are you waking up every morning and getting to the page?
What's the process?
Well, when I'm at home, I get up and I go right to my desk.
But when I'm traveling –
I just have to write when I can find the time, right?
So I usually get up first thing in the morning.
But see, I have a lot of little.
I had one crazy thing that I had to do every day and now I have two right.
What are they?
So I have to walk 10 miles a day and then I have to do Duolingo for – I have to be in the top three in the Diamond League, right?
So that's like –
What do you mean by that?
I mean the world will spin off of its axis and everybody will die if I don't do this.
I can tell myself that's it.
I'm not doing this anymore.
But I can't stop.
So it's a lot.
So I have to write and I have to do those things.
So when I'm on tour...
Let's say I get back to the room.
I've signed books.
I get back to the room at 1 o'clock in the morning.
And then someone's taking me to the airport at 7 o'clock in the morning.
Well, then maybe I have to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning.
And then...
I can usually walk like, I don't know, three, four miles in the airport.
And sometimes I can walk in the airport while doing my Duolingo.
But I still need to get a bunch of steps in before we leave for the airport.
And then sometimes you're in a city and you don't really know the city very well and it's dark.
So you're walking around the hotel, around and around, just that block.
Or sometimes you see that you're going to have time later in the afternoon, so you can kind of parse it out.
But I have writing to do, and I have Duolingo, and I have the walking to do.
So it's a lot.
What languages are you reading and saying aloud?
German and Spanish and French and Japanese.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
Now this new obsession you have with hitting your step count via your Apple Watch and then also doing Duolingo –
I'm curious, is this a stand-in for some kind of OCD that you may have?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's been all my life.
It's been one thing or another.
And I suppose the only good thing you can say about it is you don't know what it will be next.
Like it never occurred to me that the walking –
I mean, I always walked everywhere, but it didn't occur to me that I would simply have to walk a minimum of 10 miles a day before my friend Dawn came to visit and she had a Fitbit.
And it never occurred to me that I'd have the Duolingo thing until Dave, who was trying to learn Spanish.
I was on a tour of the UK and he's my tour manager there.
And he showed me and signed me up on his program.
I had no idea.
The day before that, I was free, you know.
And it's been all my life, it's been one thing or another.
What was it before?
I'm trying to even think because it's hard for me to give them up once I have them.
Well, like even writing in my diary, right?
I started writing in my diary one day when I was 20 years old.
And I've never not done it.
I mean, every now and then, let's say if I go to Australia...
You know, a time difference will cause me to lose a day every now and then.
Oh, my goodness, the thought of not doing that.
Boy, again, the earth would just spin off of its axis.
Can you explain to people what Duolingo Max is?
And then I want to read a little bit from the book.
Sure.
Duolingo is a language learning program.
And I don't know how –
I don't recall how many languages they teach, but it's an awful lot of languages.
And it's an owl as a main figure.
And then there are a number of animated characters that you learn from, and sometimes you have to write a sentence, in whatever language it is, and sometimes you just have to read a sentence, and sometimes you have to – you're given all the words and you have to arrange them into a sentence or –.
And then they opted to Duolingo Max.
And in Duolingo Max, you have conversations with an AI entity that remembers things about you.
So like yesterday, I told her I was coming here today.
So maybe today she'll ask how Los Angeles went.
And did I go shopping and what did I buy when I was in Los Angeles?
Because I told her yesterday I was going to go shopping.
And then afterwards you have a conversation and then afterwards there's a transcription of your conversation and all of your mistakes are underlined and explained, which I think is pretty great.
It's like taking a test and having it immediately graded.
Well, let's take a listen to one exchange you had with one of those AI avatars.
This is from the chapter Say It Like You Mean It.
Answer, I would like butter and eggs, please.
And the rest of the conversation follows the path you might expect.
Anything else, she asks.
But answer, yesterday a doctor cut out my tongue with a chainsaw. and white dots will fluctuate above her animated image.
This is her AI mind telling her, quick, say something.
Tell him you're sorry about the tongue, then ask if he wants to purchase something to drink instead.
Surprisingly, on that occasion, she responded, I'm sorry, I cannot continue this conversation.
Goodbye.
She hung up again when I shared my idea for a new production of Romeo and Juliet.
In it, she will be 13 and he will be 78, I told her in French.
In the Shakespeare version he kills himself with a poison drink, but in mine he will die of natural causes.
Click here.
A week before arriving at the beach, I told her about the protest I had passed in New Hampshire.
I am mad because my stupid, stupid president is a sausage, I'd said.
He cut the money for the radio and TV shows where women wear a bonnet.
You seem to really enjoy messing with the bot.
And I'm sure you've read, there are so many new reports coming out about people using these AI bots as a stand-in for therapy, which I know you only did once back in the late 80s.
I think it was in Chicago.
Yeah.
And I wondered, in the same way that you tried to get your therapist to like you, do you want to be liked by the AI?
It is pathetic how much I want Lily.
And she's a very sarcastic teenage girl.
She's the one you have the conversations with.
You can't choose who you have them.
It's just her.
And it means so much to me that she likes me.
Do you have concerns?
I mean there's a lot of talk about AI coming for writers' jobs, jobs like mine.
A lot of people in the creative industry are worried about AI. where this technology goes.
Is that something you think about?
Do you ever use AI as prompts for your writing?
You know, the biggest laugh in my entire book is...
A friend of mine, Jincy Willett, a writer, asked ChatGPT to write something in my voice.
And this was right when it first came out, right?
And she sent it to me.
And it was so lame, right?
And then I rewrote it.
And it was the biggest laugh in the entire book.
The audience howls with laughter.
And I would never have thought to write about this. had ChatGPT not written it first.
And I thought, well, that's fair.
That's not plagiarism or anything.
If a machine comes up with it and then I rewrite it, that's perfectly within my rights, right?
But I know what you mean, people being afraid that it's... coming for their jobs.
And so much of successful comedy is just surprising people, right?
Surprising people with a word they didn't expect to hear or an image they didn't expect.
And right now, I feel it's not capable of that.
But that doesn't mean it won't be capable of it in a year or two.
But me personally.
If you told me that here was a short story written by Chad GBT right, or a book, I do not believe I would want to read it.
Because I want someone on the other end, right?
I want someone who I can write to and I can say, wow, I loved your book.
I loved your story.
And I want a human to think, oh, I just sold a book.
In The Land and Its People, you, for the first time, I suppose, come out as being married.
And...
Which is not a sentence I thought I would say today, but it is true.
Why was now the time to announce your partnership – oh boy, you don't like partner.
– to announce your marriage – well, you don't like marriage either – to announce your, whatever you want to call it in this book?
Well, Hugh and I, my boyfriend and I, we've been together for like 35 years, right?
Long time.
Yeah, and then at first we were boyfriends, and then people started calling him your partner, right?
And these weren't gay people.
It was like well-meaning straight people because they thought that was the word they were supposed to use.
Partner right.
And I just hated the word partner.
And then straight people started saying partner too, so...
Then you no longer knew.
Like if a woman said to me oh, my partner and I will be at the picnic.
You didn't know if she was gay or if she was married to a man.
Or not married, but shacking up with one.
You're saying you know when words are in trouble when straight men start saying them.
Well, they were the words that well-meaning, straight people thought it was respectful to use the word partner, right?
Like the same way now that a lot of people think.
They're supposed to use the word queer, right?
And I can't stand that word, right?
But they think they've been told that this is the appropriate word now and the word that they should be using.
And then gay marriage came along, and then everyone just assumed that Hugh and I were married.
So they kept saying, you're husband.
And I would say, he's not my husband.
He's just my boyfriend, right?
So then everyone started assuming Hugh and I were married. married.
And we actually, we are married.
We got married.
I don't even know when it was.
I know it was before the pandemic.
It was a shotgun wedding arranged by my banker.
And I never told anybody about it.
And I told Hugh he couldn't tell anybody about it.
Why?
Because I don't like when a man says the word my husband.
It's like...
I met a woman at a book signing once, and she used the phrase, my son-in-law's unicycle, right?
And I thought, oh, that must pain you every time you have to say my son-in-law's unicycle.
And I wanted gay people... to get the right to marry and then I wanted not a one of us to do it.
I thought that would have been perfect.
Like to say we just wanted the right – we don't – we spit on your marriage.
We just wanted the right to do it.
Did you and your sisters make a childhood pact to never get married?
Is that how this all started?
I made my sisters sign a contract.
That I drew up I drew up contracts all the time when I was a kid Like what kinds?
Like a contract, like one time I bought my sisters Amy and Tiffany had a much bigger bedroom than I did at the time.
And it was quieter and I mean there were two of them so it made sense the room was a lot bigger.
So I drew up a contract and I bought their bedroom for a dollar.
And then my mother came down as I was moving their furniture into my teeny tiny bedroom.
And she ripped the contract up.
My sister Amy, was saying a while ago.
She said I wish I had saved all the contracts you made me sign.
And I made them sign a contract swearing they'd never get married.
But I didn't want to lose them.
I was just afraid.
Because I didn't have a word for what I was at that time.
But I just knew that there was something different about... I wasn't like the other boys.
And I just thought, well, I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life.
And I want my sisters to be with me.
I couldn't bear the thought of being alone without them.
So I got them to sign contracts, swearing they'd never get married.
But only Amy and Gretchen.
Like the other ones, I thought, okay, I'll see them on holidays or whatever.
And neither Amy nor Gretchen got married.
So they have abided by the contract while you have ripped it up in front of them.
I didn't sign a contract to stay single.
I just made them.
Yeah.
I guess you could call it brotherly love, but it's – that's amazing.
But I had said in that piece that they were –
You know, I thought of them as spinsters, you know, my sisters.
And did they like that term?
Well, they didn't mind it because they have good senses of humor.
But then I found out you're only a spinster up until the age of 25.
After that, you're called a thornback.
Well, that's just not right.
And a thornback is a bottom-feeding, skate-like fish.
No.
And I read something about that on stage and a woman came, a British woman, and said I'm actually the one who
She repopularized that term.
She was like a historian and she found that this was the term and she wrote an essay about it.
And then I don't know if I read that essay or if I read something that referred to it.
But, yeah, they're thornbacks.
But genuinely, you know, I think you got married almost 10 years ago.
Was any part of that hard to keep a secret?
Not at all.
And it didn't bother Hugh?
No.
It bothered Hugh because Hugh's not a liar.
So Hugh would just have to change the subject.
So that's what he would do when people would say, are you and David married?
He would find some way to say, how long have you been married?
So he's relieved now that he can tell people about it.
But nobody came to me and said, I can't believe it.
I thought we were friends.
And here you've been married 10 years and you didn't tell me.
Because to me, it doesn't mean anything.
Like, I never think of Hugh as my husband.
I mean, I don't want to be with anybody else.
And we've been together for a long time.
And I adore him, you know, but it doesn't mean anything to me to be married to him.
We're listening to the interview guest interviewer Sam Fragosa, recorded with writer David Sedaris, who has a new collection of personal essays titled The Land and Its People.
Sam is the host of the interview podcast Talk Easy.
We'll hear more of their conversation after a break.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
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You know, some people have suggested that the veracity of your stories, because they include your past and they're about your past, that the dialogue can be so brilliant and kind of well-written in a way that no one ever truly speaks.
And I know you keep endless diary entries and you have all that.
But I'm curious because the last time You said your father was quote not a good person, but he was a great character.
Do you think of people as characters first and people second?
No, I think of them as people, but then if I'm writing an essay, I think of them as characters.
Because if you're on the page, you're a character.
When you're in real life, you're a person.
Hugh is a good character.
My sister Gretchen.
I adore my sister Gretchen.
She's not a good character, she's a great person, and I have friends who are great people but not great characters.
And it doesn't have anything to do with being dynamic.
Maybe it's a degree of confidence that makes somebody a good character.
What do you mean?
Like confident people.
Confident people always have my ear.
Even if I don't agree with them, or even if I think their confidence is or that they're fooling themselves, right.
It doesn't matter.
It gets me to sit up straight and it gets me to listen.
And I think I'm probably not alone in that.
You can kind of hypnotize.
A confident person can hypnotize the people around him or at least can get them to listen.
And I love the combination of...
Somebody who's just a horrible person, but just brimming with confidence and just certain that they're right in all situations.
I mean, my dad was like that.
Never, never, ever showed any doubt in regard to anything.
I didn't agree with him and I didn't want to be him, but it made him a good character.
Was the Pope a good character?
Speaking of someone in power who you've listened to speak?
I don't know because I don't –
I was invited to Rome to meet the Pope, right?
The Pope that died last year.
But I didn't ever follow him.
I'm not... religious and I'm not Catholic and I don't know what his views were.
I don't know.
I mean, I just shook his hand.
It took two seconds.
But he wasn't compelling to me.
He didn't command the room.
That was interesting to me, right?
He didn't fill the room.
And I don't know if that had to do with his age or his frailty.
I mean, we were at the Vatican and we were in some room that people normally don't get to go into.
And the costumes were unbelievable.
The clothing that the cardinals wore and that the guards wore, and there were monks there in beautiful robes and nuns there.
And the Pope was like the mother of the bride, you know, just...
He had the least flattering, least interesting outfit in the room.
So that was against him, right?
And he was sitting down.
He didn't stand up.
And so that was against him to sit down.
I mean, I've only seen one president in my life.
I was at the White House and I saw Barack Obama.
I was just invited to talk with some speechwriters, right?
And then he was with the Pakistani delegation and I just saw him.
And he waved, but he was huge.
He filled that space for that little brief amount of time.
He was a force, right?
So it was just interesting to me.
So in The Land and Its People, you describe why you love biographies.
But admit that you yourself would not be a good subject for one.
Quote, I'm dull and I've never been unfaithful and I'm intellectually lazy.
I'm an idiot basically.
Always have been.
Now, I read that and I thought, do you really believe that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm not a dynamic person.
I mean, I'm not saying that with pity.
I have other qualities, but...
I'm not dynamic.
I mean, you know if you are.
Is your sister Amy?
Yeah, Amy's dynamic, yeah.
And what's the distinction you're making there?
Amy is, well, she's really beautiful and She doesn't demand your attention.
She just gets it.
Because you know that's where you want to be turning.
You know what I mean?
And I more demand your attention.
And I think that's one of the differences there.
Like I'm not anybody you would look at, you know?
And it helps me move through the world because it helps me be like a spy in a way, right?
And no one's paying attention to me.
And I think if everyone were paying attention to you, it would be harder to be a spy.
You know the way that you would need to be.
That makes me think, you know, so much of this new book is you looking back at your younger self.
And you write extensively in the book about, you know, getting older, not handling illness particularly well.
I don't know.
Anytime you think of the future, you think, well, that's just going to be me, but older.
I'm curious because you're someone who writes so vividly and beautifully about your own life.
You're about to turn 70.
Do you feel that you're looking back more than you have in previous books?
No, I don't think I look back in this book any more than I have in other ones.
I think I do it less, actually, but –
I mean, as you get older, people start dying around you and you develop health problems and it's just kind of all part of the territory.
But I feel like...
I spent my youth well.
Like, Hugh's mother, right?
Hugh's mother is 95 now.
And she and her husband got a divorce late in life because he was unfaithful.
But Hugh's mother will say, look at that girl there, oh she's just so pretty.
And look at her, she's got that little skirt on her legs.
Just look so good.
And of course her, her hair and her makeup, oh she's just lovely And she's so generous, right?
She never became bitter.
She never felt like, because her husband left her for someone else, she never took that out on her.
Other women, you know, there's a generosity there.
And you know, if you've spent your youth well, then you think well.
You know, I had my turn to be young and I really
Took full advantage of it.
I mean, if you hadn't taken advantage of it or if you were miserable when you were young, then I could see how you might get old.
And then you're just bitter and you're like it's not fair.
I had a miserable youth and now I'm old and miserable too on top of it.
So, and I had this wonderful friend named Gretchen Anderson who died, and she was 95 and she died last year.
And it was the same thing, just such a generous person, just always curious, always.
And I'd just model myself after those years.
To women, really.
I dress like them now, too.
If you're just joining us, my guest is writer David Sedaris.
His new essay collection is called The Land and Its People.
More after a break.
This is Fresh Air.
In the last chapter of your new book you reminisce about when you first moved to New York in 1990 and how broke you were then and the writer you now are living on the Upper East Side.
The inner monologue that you're having about money.
It seems to be on display in the book.
And I'm curious, like in 93, after your seminal Santa Land piece ran on NPR, you sat for an interview with The New York Times and you discussed being offered jobs to write soap operas films, I think even an episode of Seinfeld.
And the reason you turned it all down was because quote, if you start making that kind of money, then you have to keep making that kind of money.
And that's not really what I wanna do right now.
I wonder we started this conversation talking about your pretty rigorous, impressive touring schedule.
Do you feel like you have to keep making the money that you're making touring?
Is that a motivation for you at this point?
Hmm.
I don't know how much of it is about the money.
I mean, let's just take the tour that I'm on right now.
I started with four new essays and then I was able to write two little short ones during that time.
And so to be able to read them out loud and get them on their feet and get them better and better and better,
That's a lot, because if I were just sitting at home I might have written those things, but I wouldn't have had the chance to improve them the way that I've been able to on this tour.
And I love attention, right?
I love going on stage and I love people applauding, love people laughing, just love it.
Don't know how I'll survive when that's taken away from me, and I think people like to see somebody who appreciates it.
You know, When you say you don't know how you'll survive without that, without that adoration, what are you afraid of?
It's not just the adoration.
Or the laughs.
It's earning it.
Do you know what I mean?
Like earning it, earning those laughs.
I mean –
It's going to happen, you know, to everybody.
And you wind up in a nursing home and you're talking to a spatula, you know.
And hopefully, when I'm in that condition, I won't remember how wonderful it was to have this career right.
Hopefully I'll have...
I won't even know my own name hopefully, because to be there and to remember joy and know that you'll never experience it again will be pretty ugly.
I said that like somebody who has stage four cancer.
There's nothing wrong with me.
I don't foresee any end to this.
I mean, as long as people come, maybe toward the end, I'll have to pay people to come.
And the money will flow in the other direction.
That would be kind of a fitting conclusion to your career, I think.
It really would.
Well, why don't we close with a section of the book in which you've just done a good deed for someone?
It was a stranger.
I think you moved a piece of furniture for them, a cabinet down York Avenue back to her apartment.
And we pick up with the two of you part ways.
This is from chapter Cash and Carrie.
We waved goodbye and then parted, saying we'd maybe see each other in the neighborhood.
As I hurried downtown, a man sitting on the ground outside a liquor store held out an empty cup.
Help the homeless?
It irritates me when, by the homeless, people mean themselves.
It should be help one of the homeless, I wanted to say.
Otherwise, it sounds like you're going to take whatever you collect and distribute it to other people in need.
The man saw all of this playing out on my face and barked quite unfairly in my opinion.
I hope you burn in hell.
Which, of course, is another reason to live in New York.
Every day delivers a kick and always in a different spot.
There are times when being condemned to hell really gets under my skin.
Am I a terrible person, I'll ask myself?
Am I crueler than most?
Am I thoughtless?
If I'm cursed by a mentally ill person, I'll really dig in and claw at myself.
I've always seen them as prophets and hold my breath as I pass, afraid of the truth they might reveal.
In my first year in New York, not long after the Little Golden Books episode, a woman dressed in rags at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal looked me in the eye and told me that I was going to die before I reached 50.
Thousands of people moving about like ants, yet I was the one she singled out.
Her voice was clear and authoritative, like an oracle's.
Our brief encounter really lit a fire under me.
I've only got sixteen years to make a splash.
I thought, knowing that time would pass a lot faster than I'd want it to.
When I didn't die at age 50.
When I woke up in Paris as alive as I'd been the day before, I was shocked but also greatly relieved, for my life was good by then, and I didn't want it taken away from me.
This time, though, I walked on by.
Burn in hell indeed, I thought.
First off, the guy on the sidewalk outside the liquor store was a drunk, not an oracle.
Second, I had just helped a stranger carry a cabinet down York Avenue for what felt to me, and probably to her as well, like an eternity.
And a person gets points for things like that.
When authors say that writing is cathartic, does that make any sense to you?
Yeah, it makes sense, but I've never felt it to be cathartic.
It helps me make sense of the world.
I mean, and it helps me see myself.
Like, when I was young, well, no, it's never really my problem.
I never really wrote about my feelings in my diary.
Like, that's really embarrassing if you look through an old diary and it's all about your feelings.
If it's about a conversation you had at the barber shop, that's not embarrassing, right?
I could put out a whole book of haircuts.
Just haircuts I've had over the years and conversations with different barbers.
Every one of them is recounted in my diary.
I don't recall ever getting a haircut and not writing about it afterwards.
If writing isn't cathartic for you, if it doesn't exactly fix anything, even when you're writing about your own history or your friends and family.
What is it that draws you back day after day, morning after morning?
After you finish your Apple Watch jog and your Duolingo session and you go back to the page.
Why, over and over, do you keep doing it?
I want to be better.
I want to be better at everything.
And the only way to get better at everything is to work harder.
That's what I tell myself.
I say that to myself umpteen times a day.
Work harder.
Like you're not working hard enough.
But that's the promise, right?
That you can be better, that you can write better, that you can understand better, that you can speak a language better, that you can be a better person.
But it's not going to happen by accident.
You have to work at it, and so that's what puts me at my desk and that's what gets me out of bed.
Every day is just thinking because I have proof, like if I look back at my first book And it was the best I could do at the time.
But you couldn't pay me to read that thing now.
And the only way I got better was by working.
If I could get that much better in this amount of time.
If I just look at the time that I have left to live, I can get a lot better at everything between now and then.
David Sedaris, thank you for all the time.
That was so nice of you to have me on.
I really appreciate it.
David Sedaris spoke with guest interviewer Sam Fragoso.
David's new collection of personal essays is called The Land and Its People.
Sam hosts the interview podcast Talk Easy.
After we take a short break, John Powers will review two international mysteries.
This is Fresh Air.
Our critic-at-large, John Powers, has loved mysteries ever since he first read The Hardy Boys as a kid.
Over the years, he's developed a taste for crime fiction from other countries.
He's just read two excellent new ones, the first from Algeria, the other from Italy, and he says that both steer clear of the formulas of our own mystery fiction.
I've always loved mystery novels that take me inside different cultures.
While lots of English-language crime writers are good at evoking other lands think of Philip Kerr's Nazi Berlin or Kara Black's Paris the richest portraits come to us in translations of books by homegrown writers.
These have the revelatory tang you get when novelists know their culture from the inside.
As it happens, two terrific novels of this kind have just come out from Bitter Lemon Press, a small London publisher that specializes in translated mysteries.
These new books could hardly be less alike, except for one thing—
Each is, in its unconventional way, quite brilliant.
The End of the Sahara is a kaleidoscopic murder mystery by the Algerian writer Saeed Khatibi, a rising star who just won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Superbly translated by Alexander E Ellenson.
The book's set in a provincial city on the edge of the Sahara in 1988, Algeria.
A troubled time when the ruling socialist government has clearly failed.
But you don't need to know Algerian history to get sucked in by the plot which centers on the murder of Zakia Zagouani, a nightclub singer at a local hotel called the Sahara.
Burning with urgency.
The story is told by a big cast of characters who all speak to us in first person.
There's Ibrahim, a college grad who's been reduced to dealing in illegal videos.
There's the hotel owner, a shifty wheeler-dealer who fancied Zakiya.
There's Zakiya's fiancé Bachir, a decent guy found with blood on his shirt.
He's the top suspect of Inspector Hamid, a corrupt womanizing cop who also fancied Zakiya.
Bachir is represented by his cousin Nura, a good-hearted lawyer who's constantly derided for reaching 30 without a husband.
As we move from suspect to suspect, Khatibi not only makes us feel the textures of these characters' everyday lives—the looks and smells, the food shortages and emerging Islamic militancy— but he deftly unveils how they are all trapped together in a spiderweb of lies and betrayal that began in the past.
Using 1988 Algeria as a mirror for the present day, Khatibi gives us an x-ray of an entire social structure.
Even as we learn who killed Zakia, we realize that no one escapes the bone-deep misogyny that underlies her murder and the repressive post-colonial politics that leave Algerians spinning in circles.
As one character thinks bitterly.
It was as if this country's history just repeats itself, rather than moving forward.
Not surprisingly, life is far cushier along the prosperous Tuscan coast.
That's the setting for An Enigma by the Sea, a new edition of the 1991 novel by the legendary Italian team of Carlo Frutero and Franco Lucentini.
Witty, erudite and socially astute, they play with the mystery genre as they explore the many sides of Italianness.
The place is the Gualdana, a pine-protected seaside enclave where the well-off have holiday villas.
A certain air of secrecy hangs over it, the opening tells us enticingly.
The time is winter, when only a few residents are around.
They're an assortment of Italian types that includes a rich, disaffected Roman couple, a philandering count who's arrived with his latest conquest, a fame-hungry model, an old woman addicted to reading tarot cards and a smug politician stewing in paranoia.
You get a whiff of upstairs-downstairs in the relation between these moneyed folks and the locals who service their many needs the security guards, the rye police commander and the village handyman, who is also, everyone knows, the village cuckold.
Deliciously translated by Gregory Dowling.
An Enigma by the Sea starts off like a gently acerbic comedy of manners, as these self-absorbed characters go about killing time chatting flirting bickering, having tea.
Then suddenly the story shifts.
Three residents inexplicably disappear.
Could they have been murdered here?
The question unleashes the sleuthing instincts of their neighbor, Signor Manforti, a pessimistic depressive who's a born detective.
He spends his life scrutinizing every single thing for clues to impending disaster.
Masters of the light.
Fantastic Frutero and Lucentini roll out their mystery with the slyest of touches, weaving discussions of the Greek cynics and the nature of depression into their droll evocation of a grey, chilly off-season resort, with its windstorms and dire pizzerias.
If Hatibi shows us characters caught in the tragic flames of history, Frutero and Lucentini look at human folly with a cool, almost ancient amusement at what strange, funny creatures we all are.
John Powers reviewed The End of Sahara and An Enigma by the Sea.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air, our guest will be Ben Rhodes.
He was a speechwriter and deputy national security advisor for President Obama.
Rhodes has written a new book collecting and commenting on some of the most inspiring and the most divisive political speeches in American history.
It's called All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches.
I hope you'll join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.
Nesper.
Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
