My Family and Other Animals

"This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was originally meant to be mildly nostalgic account of a natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake in introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters. It was only with the greatest difficulty, and by exercising considerable cunning, that I managed to retain a few pages here and there to devote exclusively to animals."

- Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

"This is a very wicked, very funny, and I'm afraid rather truthful book — the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding-schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters."

- Lawrence "Larry" Durrell

My Family and Other Animals is a hilarious semi-autobiographical account of Gerald Durrell and his family living on the island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939 as well as various fauna of the island. Each of Gerry's family, as well as other characters, have their own idiosyncrasies that make this one of the funniest books ever written. There's his long-suffering mother that never seems to be surprised by anything, his eldest brother Larry, another famous writer; Leslie the gun nut; his ditzy older sister Margo; the over-protective family friend Spiro "Americano" Chalikiopoulos; and the naturalistic and king of Incredibly Lame Puns Dr Theodore Stephanides.

It has two sequels, Birds Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods though these are not nearly as famous as the original. It has been adapted twice for television, once as a mini-series in 1987 starring Brian Blessed and once in a 2005 made for TV film. It was also adapted for the stage in 2006.


 * Based on a True Story: Not just shortened, but there are a few inaccuracies. Larry is depicted as living with the family, though at the time he was living in another part of Corfu with his wife Nancy (shown in the film briefly but not in the book). Also, the reason that the Durrells leave the island in the book is for continuing Gerry's education, rather than the real reason for needing to go back to England.
 * Big Creepy-Crawlies: Cecily the Mantis, her fight with the gecko Geronimo is a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * Cloudcuckoolander: The Rose Beetle Man who never speaks.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Larry.
 * The Ditz: Margo.
 * Dogs Are Dumb: Dodo. Gerry says that her Victorian ignorance of the facts of life is rather touching. The other dogs in the house don't even acknowledge her existence...until they discover she comes into season very regularly. She has the attention span of a goldfish and obsessively follows Gerry's mother around, even when she is in the bath. This is taken to a new level when she had her puppy and insists on carrying it around everywhere.
 * Feathered Fiend: Alecko, the seagull.
 * Frogs and Toads: Toads make Spiro throw up.
 * Great White Hunter: Leslie.
 * Hey, It's That Guy!:
 * The 1987 TV series features Brian Blessed as Spiro.
 * In the 2005 film, Dolores Umbridge is Gerry's mother, and Ozymandias is Larry.
 * Hollywood Chameleons: Averted with the geckos and the lacewing beetles.
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: Theodore is full of these.
 * It Works Better with Bullets: Larry's first attempt at hunting snipe.
 * Large Ham: Spiro, there's a reason why he was played by Brian Blessed.
 * Loyal Animal Companion: Roger.
 * One for Sorrow, Two For Joy: Larry constantly accuses the Magenpies of being thieves and says they'll have to bury their belongings with an armed guard over them. They're given the run of the house until they are caged. Then during a party, they manage to undo the lock on their cage and get drunk.
 * Pet Baby Wild Animal: Gerry has many of these, like Achilles the tortoise, Ulysses the scops owl, the Magenpies and Quasimodo the pigeon.
 * Polly Wants a Microphone: The Magenpies, also to some extent Quasimodo who likes to dance to music.
 * Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Leslie finding snakes in the bath.
 * Scary Scorpions: Played straight when Gerry finds a mother scorpion with her babies, puts it in a matchbox that Larry brings to the breakfast table, Hilarity Ensues. Subverted by the fact that Gerry has a lot of respect for scorpions and wanted to raise a colony so he could study them more closely, but his family (unsurprisingly, all things considered) flatly refused.
 * Tortoise Power: There's Achilles, as well as the dueling tortoises that fight over the ladies.