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Durrell, Gerald

My Family and Other Animals, [18] 38, [44] 6

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20080601173158 Barbara Hilliamillustration - Nicholas Murray on Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals - Slightly Foxed Issue 18

Birds, Bees and Scorpions

Nicholas Murray on Gerald Durrell My Family and Other Animals

If one were searching for the perfect antidote to Mis-lit one would find it triumphantly in Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. First published in 1956 and in print ever since, the book is surely one of the most enjoyable English memoirs of the second half of the twentieth century. Every page is a celebration of the colours, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of the then unspoilt island of Corfu where the Durrell family arrived in March 1935 and where they lived until their expulsion from Eden in 1939 on the outbreak of war. It is beautifully written, with some astonishingly vivid and exact descriptions, whether of capturing a water snake in a stream or watching a lizard in its progress across a nocturnal ceiling, and it gets away, effortlessly, with all sorts of things one isn’t meant to get away with, not least the antics and tics of Funny Foreigners.
20160420123126 Slightly Foxed Editions: Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals

The Strawberry-Pink Villa

Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals

The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, had the flowerbeds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake’s head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles and circles, all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild.
20141201125900 Slightly Foxed Editions: Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals

Paradise Regained

Simon Barnes, Preface to Gerald Durrell, My Family & Other Animals

Durrell Every paradise is lost. That’s kind of the point. Loss is the diagnostic feature of every paradise ever lived or imagined. But for five miraculous years and 120,000 miraculous words Gerald Durrell sustained a vision of paradise with joy in every day and every page. Most evocations of paradise dwell on the eventual loss: not here. My Family and Other Animals is a tale of uninterrupted delight . . .

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