My Family and Other Animals
by Gerald Durrell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gerald DurrellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1977-03-31
ISBN: 0140013997
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of My Family and Other Animals
Book Review: I may read it again next week
Summary: 5 Stars
I cannot remember when I enjoyed reading a book so much as this one. It is about the five years the author (Lawrence Durrell's younger brother) spent living on the island of Corfu as a youngster and budding naturalist. It is full of anecdotes about collecting animals and about the family that delight the heart and tickle the funnybone. His collection of animals includes snakes, birds, furry things. There is a collection of dogs with peculiar names. Theodore Stephanides, a real life person, a doctor who helps Gerald organize his collection in more or less scientific fashion, figures in some of Lawrence Durrell's writings. He was apparently a wonderful and possibly brilliant person. Concerned over the young boy's education, or lack of it, his mother sends him a few times a week to the Belgian consul, who tries to teach him French by reading out of the dictionary, starting with ''A''. Of course he learns no French. The consul spends most of the lesson time shooting mangy cats on neighboring roofs. This is not an act of cruelty: the town is overpopulated by cats and they are mostly ill and dying and spreading disease. Then Mother sends him to a British person with a Slavic surname for lessons in just about everything. This strange looking man has a collection of rare birds and a mother who never leaves her bed but has wonderful fantasies about her own lost beauty. Older brother Lawrence is, of course, a writer still learning his craft. Leslie is the gun expert who builds the youngster a strange boat for use in collecting marine specimens. Margo is the sister who cares for little in life but how she looks in a bathing suit. Spiro is a hefty Greek with a big belly who drives the family around in his car and helps them in unexpected ways, even getting them out of innocent scrapes with police and customs officials. The mother is a marvelously sensible English lady who behaves very properly and cooks up a storm, almost constantly. The author's language and style are elegant, and one gets the sense of looking at the world through the wondering eyes of a young boy, but always with the idea that behind him there is the mature and accomplished writer. Yes, reading this one again next week would not be a bad idea.
Summary of My Family and Other Animals
This book is soaked in the sunshine of Corfu where the author lived as a boy with his 'Family and other Animals'. It is a matter of personal taste whether one most enjoys the family, with its many eccentric hangers-on, or the animals Gerry studies and brings back to the strawberry pink, the daffodil-yellow, or the snow-white villa. The procession includes toads, and tortoises, bats and butterflies scorpions and geckos, ladybirds, glow-worms, octopuses and rose-beetles, Quasimodo the pigeon, the puppies Widdle and Puke, and of course the magpies.As a self-described "champion of small uglies," English writer Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) devoted his life to writing and the preservation of wildlife, from the Mauritius pink pigeon to the Rodriques fruit bat. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the Greek island of Corfu, but ended up as a delightful account of his family's experiences that were, according to him, "rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas."
As a 10-year-old boy, Gerry left England for Corfu with "all those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids." Durrell's descriptions of his family and its many eccentric hangers-on (he stresses that "all the anecdotes about the island and the islanders are absolutely true") are highly entertaining, as is the procession of toads, scorpions, geckos, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, the puppies Widdle and Puke, and the Magenpies. This is a lovely book.
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