The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell
My rating: 4/5 cats
there are three sad books awaiting reviews before this one, but i don’t even care, because this one needs to be reviewed right now!! sorry, marguerite duras! let’s call this even!!
how great is gerald durrell?? did someone say “very great??” because that is the correct answer. he is very great.
i have been meaning to read him for ages now, especially since i learned that he frequently deflates pompous brother lawrence in his books; in a good-natured brotherly way. and i appreciate lawrence durrell like nobody’s business, but if ever someone needed to be taken down a peg…and gerald is a man not afraid to get his hands dirty or bitten by a snake or pecked by a bird which is a perfect contrast to “larry” (sadly almost-unmentioned in this book) with his lavender and lemon palette and his casual intellectual dilettantes basking in the alexandrian air.
gerald is more my kind of man.
this book is great—is this still something that can be done? can i, karen t. brissette, just go off to some relatively remote region and hole up somewhere while the natives happily bring me live specimens of their local fauna?? because i can just see it now: me, sprawled out somewhere in australia, reading their exceptional YA fiction, and waiting for the knock on the door that would indicate that a wombat had been found for me, or a bushbaby. and i would just fan out some fistfuls of cash, gather the fuzzy thing in my arms, and close the door behind us, sealing us away for snuggles and cupcake-time. because i would love to do this, and i envy gerald durrell for his freedom, in 1956, to have animals brought right to him, even though he was in paraguay and not australia, so he mainly got some birds and snakes and stuff. me, i like mammals. he did get some good ones, though:
that one is a bird, true, but he’s a pretty cute bird, so i would accept one of him.
this book was so much fun, i laughed aloud at several moments on my subway home, making me look like the crazy one, despite the man in the cowboy hat and duster yelling “it’s too loud—all you motherfuckers have to get off at the next stop sheeeeit”
if i was allowed to have a pet hippo, i would have him trample that man.
who will bring me one?
read my book reviews on goodreads
