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Saroja
We took a last glass of wine with Katrina and Stephanos and then made our way sleepily through the olive groves, silvered by a moon as large and as white as a magnolia blossom. The scops owls chimed mourfully to each other, and the odd firefly winked emerald-green as we passed. The warm air smelled of the day's sunshine, of dew, and of a hundred aromatic leaf scents. Mellow and drugged with wine, walking between the great hunched olives, their trunks striped with cool moonlight, I think we all felt that we had arrived, that we had been accepted by the island. We were now, under the quiet, bland eye of the moon, christened Corfiotes. The night was beautiful, and tomorrow, we knew, another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never existed.
'Luscious' is the first word that occurs to me when I read the prose of this naturalist and humourist. Everything Durrell describes teems abundant with life. But what gives rise to the tickling, rollicking humour of his writing? Characterisation is what most would say. Or dialogues, perhaps. And... can you believe all those incidents he narrates? So intrinsically comic!
As I came to the end of the first chapter in this sequel to the classic My Family and Other Animals, the author's portly shape and laughing face remembered from the documentary Himself and Other Animals kept coming back to my mind. Blithe as his own image is his writing. Not from ironic distortions, not from comic tolerance of human foibles, the sparkle of Durrell's prose stems from his vast and unbridled enthusiasm for all that is living. To travel through Durrell's work is to encounter zoo after zoo of life forms, human and otherwise, often indistinguishably so.
Saroja
We took a last glass of wine with Katrina and Stephanos and then made our way sleepily through the olive groves, silvered by a moon as large and as white as a magnolia blossom. The scops owls chimed mourfully to each other, and the odd firefly winked emerald-green as we passed. The warm air smelled of the day's sunshine, of dew, and of a hundred aromatic leaf scents. Mellow and drugged with wine, walking between the great hunched olives, their trunks striped with cool moonlight, I think we all felt that we had arrived, that we had been accepted by the island. We were now, under the quiet, bland eye of the moon, christened Corfiotes. The night was beautiful, and tomorrow, we knew, another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never existed.
'Luscious' is the first word that occurs to me when I read the prose of this naturalist and humourist. Everything Durrell describes teems abundant with life. But what gives rise to the tickling, rollicking humour of his writing? Characterisation is what most would say. Or dialogues, perhaps. And... can you believe all those incidents he narrates? So intrinsically comic!
As I came to the end of the first chapter in this sequel to the classic My Family and Other Animals, the author's portly shape and laughing face remembered from the documentary Himself and Other Animals kept coming back to my mind. Blithe as his own image is his writing. Not from ironic distortions, not from comic tolerance of human foibles, the sparkle of Durrell's prose stems from his vast and unbridled enthusiasm for all that is living. To travel through Durrell's work is to encounter zoo after zoo of life forms, human and otherwise, often indistinguishably so.
They were grouped, like a pride of moody lions, round a fire so large and flamboyant that there was immediate danger of its setting fire to the chimney. My sister Margo had just added to it by the simple method of dragging in the carcass of a small tree from the garden and pushing one end into the fireplace, while the remainder of the trunk lay across the hearth-rug.
(To be contd.)
