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Some of my favourite readings are books written by foreign writers where the setting is in Greece.
Always amazed by their perspective on Greek life and people, I have picked a few that I would like to share with you, and I will start with an excerpt from The Corfu Trilogy, by Gerald Durrell, first published in 1956 (Penguin, 2006). It comprises three separate stories My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods. Just before WWII and after his father’s death, Gerald, 10, and his family (his mother, older brother and renown writer Laurence, his second brother Leslie, and his sister Margaret) decide to leave England and visit their favourite island of Corfu, in Greece, where he will discover his passion for animals.
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Gerald Malcolm Durrell, OBE. (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995)
was a British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_empty_space][grve_quote]My childhood in Corfu shaped my life. If I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood.” ― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals[/grve_quote][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row footer_feature=”yes” padding_bottom=”100″ margin_bottom=”0″ padding_top=”100″][vc_column][vc_column_text]
I was enchanted by this short paragraph from Durrell’s arrival in Greece, by the way he describes the shapes and colours of Greece:
“The migration”
…Ahead lay a chocolate-brown smudge of land, huddled in mist, with a frill of foam at its base. This was Corfu, and we strained our eyes to make out the exact shapes of the mountains, to discover valleys, peaks, ravines, and beaches, but it remained a silhouette. Then suddenly the sun lifted over the horizon, and the sky turned the smooth enameled blue of a jay’s eye. The endless, meticulous curves of the sea flamed for an instant and then changed to a deep royal purple flecked with green… The shallow sea in the bays was butterfly blue, and even above the sound of the ship’s engines we could hear, faintly ringing from the shore like a chorus of tiny voices, the shrill, triumphant cries of the cicadas.”
L. V. Paidoussi
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