I picked this book up to see if I still liked James Thurber. I hadn't read him for about twenty years, and the book itself is about sixty years old. Humor generally doesn't have a long shelf-life, so I was a bit skeptical. Still, much of this book was funny. His work doesn't hold up quite as well as that of Stephen Leacock, but there were times I laughed out loud. The book is a bit uneven, but that can be said of most humor collections. One of the highlights is a piece at the end about all the strange translations Thurber found in a French-English "pocket interpreter" for travelers is one of my favorites. I'm hoping I never need to know the French expression for "he has burnt his face."
The collection also contains perhaps his most famous story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," which I still love. It always amazes me that it's only nine pages long. This is probably one of the shortest stories ever on which a movie was based.
Finally, I can't help but think of David Sedaris when I read Thurber. It's partly because they happen to be next to each other on my bookshelf and because both wrote extensively for The New Yorker. Still, the last section where Thurber wanders around France in a mostly bewildered state reminds me very much of Sedaris' articles about living in Paris. Sedaris just works a little more blue. That's all.
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