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apechild 's review for:
My Family and Other Animals
by Gerald Durrell
2007 bookcrossing journal:
I can't decide if this is straight biography, fiction, or fiction inspired and based very closely on his life. In the biography notes at the front of the book it mentions that Durrell did spend some years on Corfu with his family. But on the back of the book Penguin have marked it as fiction. Oh, I am so easily confussed!
Anyway, this is set in the earlier half of the twentieth century, following a family of one mother and four children (three of which are young adults) out to Corfu to live - a decision made on a bit of a whim, as most things they do seem to be. They must be the eccentric upper class, as they can afford to do all this, but never actually work. And what a life! Our narrator, Gerry, a ten year old boy, sets out into the countryside with his trusty dog Roger and explores Corfu: making friends with the locals and finding out a lot about the local wildlife. And there are tortoises roaming about on the hills there! I was quite jealous as I would have loved a tortoise when I was little. The people that feature in this story all seem to be charming eccentrics, from their rough and hairy taxi driver and all-round helper Spiro to the bug encyclopedia on legs, Theodore. And all of Gerry's pets who cause regular chaos in the household. I thought the Magenpies were great. In his writing you can see he has a great respect for the animals, and sees them all as individuals with their own personalities.
The only thing I didn't like - not so much about the book as the way he carried on - was this obsessive collecting of specimins, and picking up nearly every type of animal out of the wild and force it to be domesticated. Ok, so this is probably the after effects of the collecting-mad attitude of the Victorians. And the book is of course several decades old, so you can't apply modern standards to it in the same way. Although I think people still do this, which does irritate me. A couple of days ago my boss was saying that someone they knew had seen a slow worm - put it in a box and given it to her daughter. So this poor sodding slow worm is now stuck in a box in their utility room. I bit my tongue and said nothing.
I can't decide if this is straight biography, fiction, or fiction inspired and based very closely on his life. In the biography notes at the front of the book it mentions that Durrell did spend some years on Corfu with his family. But on the back of the book Penguin have marked it as fiction. Oh, I am so easily confussed!
Anyway, this is set in the earlier half of the twentieth century, following a family of one mother and four children (three of which are young adults) out to Corfu to live - a decision made on a bit of a whim, as most things they do seem to be. They must be the eccentric upper class, as they can afford to do all this, but never actually work. And what a life! Our narrator, Gerry, a ten year old boy, sets out into the countryside with his trusty dog Roger and explores Corfu: making friends with the locals and finding out a lot about the local wildlife. And there are tortoises roaming about on the hills there! I was quite jealous as I would have loved a tortoise when I was little. The people that feature in this story all seem to be charming eccentrics, from their rough and hairy taxi driver and all-round helper Spiro to the bug encyclopedia on legs, Theodore. And all of Gerry's pets who cause regular chaos in the household. I thought the Magenpies were great. In his writing you can see he has a great respect for the animals, and sees them all as individuals with their own personalities.
The only thing I didn't like - not so much about the book as the way he carried on - was this obsessive collecting of specimins, and picking up nearly every type of animal out of the wild and force it to be domesticated. Ok, so this is probably the after effects of the collecting-mad attitude of the Victorians. And the book is of course several decades old, so you can't apply modern standards to it in the same way. Although I think people still do this, which does irritate me. A couple of days ago my boss was saying that someone they knew had seen a slow worm - put it in a box and given it to her daughter. So this poor sodding slow worm is now stuck in a box in their utility room. I bit my tongue and said nothing.