Reading: My Family and Other Animals

I have loved Gerald Durrell's work since someone gave me a copy of A Zoo In My Luggage for airplane reading in my very early youth; to me, Lawrence Durrell is merely Gerald's older and less funny brother, a viewpoint which would no doubt pain them both. These days, A Zoo In My Luggage makes me a little uncomfortable, being about a white man who goes to Africa and surrounds himself with Cameroonian servants who call him "Masa," but I still read it for the animals, which are classic to the point of being immortal.

In the introduction to My Family and Other Animals, Durrell writes "This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters."

They are also what makes the book laugh-out-loud-till-your-nose-runs-and-people-on-the-subway-look-at-you-strange funny. The passages on Corfu's animal and plant life are indeed beautiful, almost poetic, but the crazy people in and surrounding the Durrell family are the kinds of characters who could only have been invented -- it astonishes me that they actually existed outside someone's fevered imagination. Larry, obsessed with books; Leslie, obsessed with guns; Margo, obsessed with herself; Gerry, obsessed with animals; and towering above them all (only in the metaphorical sense, as she was apparently about four feet ten), their indomitably eccentric Mother: passively but surely focusing all their individual oddities into a grand, tidelike surge of family strangeness.

My favorite thing about Durrell's style in MFaOA (also its sequels Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fauna and Family) is that, while the book is written in the first person, he never quotes himself. Everyone else "talks," but Gerry merely tells us what he said. The effect is one of a slightly drunk raconteur telling the story of his childhood long, long afterward.