Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Much like the first book, this was a delight. GD writes beautifully about the natural world, and is hilarious and insightful about humans. Having visited Ionian Greece (Lefkada), these books are especially vivid and just make me desperately want to go back.

All that said, I'm a little bit horrified by the amount of meddling with wild animals done in the name of genuine intellectual pursuit. It's so antithetical to my "leave no trace" and "leave the animals the fuck alone" and "neuter your damn dogs" mentality about being out in nature, not to mention I imagine most of his menagerie would have preferred to go about their business undisturbed. I guess that's the price of human understanding of the world!

Gerald Durrell proves that he was no one-trick pony with this delightful follow-up to 'My Family and Other Animals' The gorgeous islands of Corfu are still untouched by modernity and the ravages of the war soon to come, and young Gerald spends his days exploring every inch of the terrain in search for new captures for his bedroom zoo. The detail is loving, the descriptions delightful, and yet as beautiful as the creatures all certainly are, it is the people who populate this book that make it so fantastically memorable.

I adore Gerald Durrell. This is definitely on the list of Books That Have Made Me Emit Embarrassingly Loud Snorting Noises in Public. And I'm probably in the minority here, but I actually like this one more than "My Family and Other Animals."

Written around 10 + years after the highly successful 'My Family and Other Animals', Gerald Durrell returns to his childhood on the sun-drenched island of Corfu. Here we again meet the wonderful characters of the first book (with some delightful additions) but in new and often hilarious situations. This book is not so much a continuation of the first book as an addition, with scenes slotting into the structural narrative of the previous story. Again it is warm and funny and full of the joie de vivre. More laugh out loud moments – for me the incident of Gerry finding a large Turtle in the sea and what happens next was truly memorable. The way that Gerry's reaction to this incident (and of course his family's) is described reminded me show more somewhat of how 'William' from the Richmal Crompton stories might have been.
Although 'My Family and Other Animals' did conclude with the family leaving the island in 1939 ostensibly to carry on Gerry's education in England, it is the ending of this story with the family on a beautiful moonlit excursion on a freshly painted benzina with numerous hampers of food and wine, enjoying the last of the summer and dreaming of 'brilliant days that were not to be' that is the more poignant. show less

This book is interesting, highly amusing, humane, and just simply wonderful. While I was reading it, Peter Mayles' A Year In Provence came to mind. Not that they are in any way similar. It was because I distinctly remember being struck while reading Mayles' book how self-consciously humorous it was. Yes, it was funny, but I could feel how Mayles had worked to make it so.

Not so with Gerald Durrell. His humor is truthful and comes from the heart. There's no artifice and much of it is laugh-out-loud funny. His family is a riot and his stories have the simplicity of truth. I'm looking forward to finding and reading the third of the trilogy.

Delightful, funny, curious as always, Durrell had me laughing on page four... This book takes place more or less at the same time as My Family and Other Animals, overlapping without a lot of repeats. It tells those stories which were left out the first time around. Including: the time his sister got mixed up with a group of spiritualists (who held seances), the time he longed to buy a dancing bear off a gypsy, the time his older brother was taken to court by a Greek peasant who insisted that Gerry's dog had eaten five of his prize turkeys.It's full of interesting and colorful characters- both his family members, their friends, visitors, and acquaintances around the island- and many amusingly outrageous incidents. Sadly, I couldn't help show more reading between the lines this time around, having learned what Durrell never really spoke of in his books- that they fled England because the family was ruined by his mother's alcoholism, that the family was disliked by many on the island, considered scandalous for their behavior- and it's true that in the book Gerald frequently mentions them drinking- he must have been eight or nine years old at the time? yet he is given wine by his older brothers, champagne by an elderly woman he visits (to acquire an injured barn own) coffee by his tutor, etc. It sounds like a wonderfully carefree existence- him as a kid roaming the island, observing and collecting animals- yet I wonder if there wasn't a bit of neglect in there, too. One time he ran over to a neighbor's house and watched a young, newly married peasant woman giving birth- had a front-row seat and described it in detail, matter-of-factly. There's also the callously blunt way the family talks about his sister Margo's struggles with her weight and her skin condition. I'd be embarrassed if I were her.

Aside from all that, I did love the descriptions of the wildlife and other animals Durrell acquired or observed in nature. His family gave him a young donkey for his birthday, and it enabled him to explore more of the island. He met fishermen and older gentlemen also interested in nature, who took him out on the reef, or wading in the lake, to collect stuff. He describes crabs that camouflage themselves by sticking bits of seaweed (or whatever objects he gave them when corralled in a barren pool) on their shells, elvers migrating through a dry streambed to the lake, a diving bell spider (who ate her children), a pet owl and a family of young hedgehogs. Most wonderful was reading about the time he caught half a dozen small seahorses, and kept them for a brief time in an aquarium in his room. Durrell didn't have any kind of filter or means of water circulation as a kid. He tells of hauling buckets- going down to the beach to get fresh seawater for them- five times a day in order to keep the tank clean enough. I know what work it is enough to haul a few buckets down the hall to the nearest sink! No wonder he kept them just a brief time before letting them go in the sea again.

And that's just scratching the surface. There's so much more!

from the Dogear Diary show less

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is one of those books that keeps the party going. As the second book in the Corfu trilogy, Birds includes stories previously untold in My Family and Other Animals. While the Durrell family only spent four years on the Greek island of Corfu, Gerald was able to dig around in his memory and find always humorous and sometimes outrageous and obviously exaggerated situations to share, much to his family's chagrin. They usually involved young Gerald coming across some wild animal and insisting it become part of the family as an honorary pet (such as an owl, given to Gerald by an eccentric Countess).