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British comedian Eddie Izzard has been thinking a lot about language (no suprise to anyone who's heard him riff on monkeys on branches, mice under tables, and cats on chairs).

And he's had a crazy idea: Training himself in new languages — German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic — so when he's on the road, he can perform in his audience's native tongue. Though that won't be a challenge when he hits the road in America this week.

Izzard tells NPR's David Greene that he was seven years old when he first knew he wanted to go onstage. "I was watching this other kid, and he was getting a lot of reaction and applause, and whatever he was doing he was doing right, and I thought, I have got to do that. I have analyzed this in my self-analysis way as, my mother had died a year before and I believe I swapped the affection or the reaction of the audience for what I'd lost from my mother."

Divers on Monday renewed their search for more than 100 bodies still trapped in a sunken ferry after weekend efforts were hindered by bad weather, strong currents and floating debris clogging the ship's rooms. Officials said they have narrowed down the likely locations in the ship of most of the remaining missing passengers.

Divers found only one body Sunday after a week that saw an increasing number of corpses pulled from the ship as divers made their way through its labyrinth of cabins, lounges and halls. The number of dead from the April 16 sinking is 188, with 114 people believed missing, though a government emergency task force has said the ship's passengers list could be inaccurate. Only 174 people survived, including 22 of the 29 crew members.

Senior coast guard officer Kim Su-hyeon said that most of the remaining missing passengers are believed to be in 64 of the ship's 111 rooms. Divers have entered 36 of those 64 rooms, coast guard officers said, but may need to go back into some because floating debris made it difficult for divers to be sure that there are no more dead bodies.

Ko Myung-seok, an official with the emergency task force, said Monday that 92 divers would search the ferry. He also said that the government was making plans to salvage the ferry once search efforts end but that details wouldn't be available until officials talk with families of the victims.

On Sunday, South Korea's prime minister resigned over the government's handling of the sinking, blaming "deep-rooted evils" in society for the tragedy.

South Korean executive power is largely concentrated in the president, so Chung Hong-won's resignation appears to be symbolic. Presidential spokesman Min Kyung-wook said President Park Geun-hye would accept the resignation, but did not say when Chung would leave office.

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I'm sure that some people would read these lines (and many others in the book) and think the narrator is deliberately being dispassionate, and that that is part of the point. And maybe it is. But I don't think he is particularly stiff or even cold. (For stiffness that feels very novelistic, read Ishiguro's butler narrative, The Remains of the Day.) I don't even think he's really much of a narrator, exactly, but is instead a very modest, disembodied sensibility trying to stay out of the way and just show what life is like in a place that most outsiders know little about.

And maybe, really, this isn't a novel at all. Maybe it is a collection of fiction. I generally don't understand it when a writer says "the town is a character" in his or her book. But in the case of Every Day is For the Thief, Lagos has been injected with more character than the narrator, who prefers not to call attention to himself, but instead to slip along, practically unnoticed, and take poignant snapshots of the strange and singular city around him. The separate sections of this book don't read like chapters, exactly, and they don't gather force, though they are consistently engaging and interesting.

So is the novel worth escaping from? Is it sort of a cushy and familiar prison for writers? There are times when perhaps all novelists, myself included, feel afraid that without knowing it they are making their work more conventional in order to accommodate that old "and then she said this to him, and then this happened" nature of the form. It's probably a good idea to deliberately get outside of that once in a while.

Maybe, for Teju Cole, an eloquent writer who seems to be perfecting an on-the-move and not entirely categorizable subtype of fiction, the idea of writing a traditional novel feels about as exciting as spending a night trapped in darkness and unremitting heat.

Read an excerpt of Every Day Is for the Thief

It has been 102 years since it was written on board the Titanic, describing a pleasant Sunday spent on the cruise ship that was headed for disaster. The letter fetched 119,000 pounds (about $200,000) at auction in England Saturday, surpassing expectations by $30,000.

"Well, the sailors say we have had a wonderful passage up to now," the letter from a passenger to her mother reads in part. "There has been no tempest, but God knows what it must be when there is one."

The unique artifact is believed to be the the only surviving letter written aboard the doomed ship on April 14, the day the Titanic hit an iceberg. More than 1,500 people lost their lives when the ship sank.

From London, Larry Miller reports for NPR's Newscast unit:

"The letter on Titanic stationary was written by survivors Esther Hart and her 7-year-old daughter, Eva, eight hours before the Titanic hit a North Atlantic iceberg and sank.

"Addressed to Hart's mother in England, she wrote they were enjoying the wonderful journey, that she was over her sea sickness, that she had gone to church service that Sunday morning and enjoyed the hymns.

"She wrote the ship was moving so fast they'd be arriving in New York early. The letter survived because it was in the pocket of her husband's coat, which he gave her to keep warm before the Titanic sank. While mother and daughter made it to a lifeboat, Hart's husband went down with the ship.

"Also at the auction: a Titanic second-class menu and a metal plate from a lifeboat."