My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell Review: A Sun-Drenched Autobiographical Classic

A durable classic of comic autobiographical writing, My Family and Other Animals remains the most celebrated entry in Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy and one of the best-loved works of British nature writing of the twentieth century.

My Family and Other Animals is an autobiographical work — or, more precisely, an exaggerated and sometimes fictionalised account of autobiography — in which Gerald Durrell recalls the years he spent as a child on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939. Durrell was ten years old at the start of the family's sojourn, and the book follows the Durrells through three successive villas on the island, a structure that divides the text into three distinct sections. The Durrell household is presented as gloriously chaotic: a widowed mother who tolerates the mounting parade of wildlife her youngest son drags home; eldest brother Larry (the future novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell), who fills the house with artistic and literary visitors; the gun-obsessed Leslie; and the perpetually dieting Margo. Originally conceived as a work of natural history, the book, as Penguin Random House's own description notes, "ended up as a delightful account of Durrell's family's experiences, from the many eccentric hangers-on to the ceaseless procession of puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies into their home."

Beyond the family itself, a gallery of memorable figures populates the narrative. Spiro "Americano" Hakiaopulos, the family's fiercely loyal taxi-driver friend, and Dr. Theodore Stephanides, the polymath who becomes young Gerald's guide and mentor in natural history, are central to the book's texture. Gerald's succession of private tutors and the local Corfu residents the family befriends add further colour. According to Wikipedia's account of the book, the human characters are "chiefly eccentric," and it is this ensemble quality — the sense of a whole small world assembled on a sun-drenched island — that distinguishes the book from a straightforward nature memoir. The real Lawrence Durrell, who went on to write The Alexandria Quartet and become a major figure in twentieth-century English literature, is rendered here as an affectionately comic figure, which gives the book an additional layer of interest for readers already familiar with his work.

When My Family and Other Animals was published in 1956, it was, as Wikipedia records, an instant success — and Durrell had already established himself with books about collecting animals in the wild for zoos. The book's combination of comic family portraiture and heartfelt natural-history enthusiasm gave it an audience far beyond specialist readers. Its cultural reach has only extended since: the book served as the direct inspiration for the Masterpiece PBS series The Durrells in Corfu, bringing a new generation to the source text. Wikipedia also notes that Durrell's Corfu books helped stimulate tourism to the island, an unusual real-world consequence for a work of autobiographical prose. The proceeds and fame from this and his other books enabled Durrell to found the Jersey Zoological Park — now the Durrell Wildlife Park — in the Channel Islands, a conservation institution that outlasts the book itself as part of his legacy.

Readers approaching My Family and Other Animals as a straightforward memoir should be aware of its relationship to the facts. Wikipedia's detailed account notes that the events described are not always accurate: Lawrence Durrell actually lived in a separate part of Corfu with his first wife, Nancy Durrell, whom Gerald omits entirely from the narrative. The chronology of events as presented in the book is also documented as inaccurate. Durrell himself acknowledged writing the book in an exaggerated and sometimes fictionalised manner. For readers who prize strict documentary truth in autobiography, this is a relevant caveat. For those comfortable with the tradition of memoir-as-literature — shaped, heightened, and selectively remembered — it is less a flaw than a feature of the genre Durrell is working in.

My Family and Other Animals sits at an enjoyable crossroads: it works as nature writing, as comic family portrait, as evocation of a lost pre-war Mediterranean world, and as the first chapter in Durrell's own remarkable life story. The Penguin edition reviewed here is the first book in the three-volume Corfu Trilogy, which continues with Birds, Beasts, and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods. Readers who respond to Durrell's blend of natural-history enthusiasm and domestic comedy will find the subsequent volumes ready to follow. Those coming to the book via the PBS television adaptation will recognise its principal characters and situations while finding that the original text has its own distinct, prose-driven pleasures. A review published on The Guardian's reader review platform described the book as "so vibrant, warm and weird at the same time" — a fair characterisation of its tonal range.