Foxed and Deckled: My Family and Other Animals

The cover of this little paperback attracted me at the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library used bookstore. I love when this happens: you find a great book by an author of whom you've never heard, and it turns out that he or she wrote lots of other books, so you've got a whole cache of new reading material! It seems that everyone but me already knew about this hilarious autobiographical account of the writer's boyhood years on the Greek island of Corfu with his eccentric English family. The domestic cast of characters includes Durrell's older brother, the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell. Young Gerald is passionately interested in birds, animals, reptiles, and insects. During the family's fve-year sojourn on Corfu, he devotes himself to studying the island's wildlife -- and to bringing creatures into the family villa, often to comic effect. The 2005 BBC film based on this memoir is fun, but it's nothing compared to the book. For one thing, the 90-minute movie doesn't have time for many of the colorful secondary players, like Mrs. Kralefsy, the mother of Gerald's tutor, who can converse with flowers. In the following passage, she speaks of a deep-red rose:

"Isn't he wonderful? Now, I've had him two weeks. You'd hardly believe it, would you? And he was not a bud when he came. No, no, he was fully open. But, do you know, he was so sick that I did not think he would live? The person who plucked him was careless enough to put him in with a bunch of Michaelmas daisies. Fatal, absolutely fatal! You have no idea how cruel the daisy family is, on the whole. They are a very rough-and-ready sort of flowers, very down to earth, and, of course, to put such an aristocrat as a rose amongst them is just asking for trouble. By the time he got here he had drooped and faded to such an extent that I did not even notice him among the daisies. But, luckily, I heard them at it. I was dozing here when they started, particularly, it seemed to me, the yellow ones, who always seem so belligerent."

Here's another Durrell memoir, this one about his adult life as a zoologist. It describes his animal-collecting trips to the Cameroons, Guayana, and Paraguay.