Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

¶ … David Sedaris

The experience of learning a new language, especially at an adult age, should be both pleasant and rewarding, especially if one has the opportunity to learn it among those who are its native speakers. There is hardly something I can imagine being more pleasant than learning French in Paris. Yet, David Sedaris' essay, Me Talk Pretty One Day, presents an unfortunate experience as a beginner enrolled in a French class in a school in Paris.

Sedaris' enumeration of the places he got a discount for as a consequence of his enrolling in school is announcing a humorous story about the experience a forty-one-year-old has when going back to school to start all over again, just like a six-year-old. Since the discount tickets to puppet shows and Festyland are more appropriate for the latter kind of age, the irony of an adult of forty one still getting them is obvious.

The story that follows that humorous introduction is in stark contrast with the initial tone because it almost immediately starts to present an unfortunate, almost disturbing experience, with the French teacher as the villain. The story keeps its humorous tone that is destined to relax what would otherwise be an account of an unpleasant experience. For example, the author describes the teeth of one of the Polish girls who had the misfortune to introduce themselves first, as having "the size of tombstones." The macabre comparison and the exaggeration are destined to make the reader smile while imagining the poor girl struggling to express her likes and dislikes through her huge front teeth, in a language that she does not master.

The ethnic numerous ethnic references in the text, like for example, that referring to Carlos, the Argentine, who loved "wine, music, and in his words "making sex with the woman's of the world" are bringing out cliches about different nationalities and what is generally known, or better said, though of, as being characteristic. Since Carlos appears to be unable to shake the cliche, he is presenting himself exactly they way anyone would expect from an Argentine named Carlos. The German Eva enrolls herself in the same category when she admits she hates "laziness." On the other hand, the reference to the beautiful young Yugoslav is deeper and also surprising, especially since the reader him or herself is tempted to seize the irony of a Yugoslav saying that he likes to live. The immediate feeling of guilt is accentuated by the teacher's response that is beyond her usual sarcasm, being utterly cruel.

In her response to the Yugoslavian, the teacher is deliberately making an understatement when she calls the war in Yugoslavia "your little war." Since it is obviously no little war she is talking about, the question is destined to have the effect of a cold shower on all those who were tempted to find the beautiful Yugoslav's answer charming.

The irony goes both ways since it is not only the teacher who is able to seize it in every answer and transform it in torturing sarcasm, but the narrator himself is having his own little inner voice jokes about the exaggerating importance of gender for French words that designate inanimate objects like "typewriter."