Books: Argentina by Owl Light

• Share

THE WHISPERING LAND (235 pp.)—Gerald Durrell—Viking ($3.95).

After several weeks of stalking the proper sello (rubber stamp) through the corridors of the Buenos Aires customs house, Zoologist Gerald Durrell was feeling (as his brother, the logodaedalist novelist Lawrence Durrell, might have put it) both phthisic and etiolated. But before long Durrell was again at peace, sleeping under his Land Rover, tormenting a 20-ft.-long bull sea elephant into a cinema-genic rage, using his own big toe as bait to lure a rare vampire bat. The author is a zoophile who tired several years ago of catching animals for other people and, as he related in A Zoo in My Luggage, set about establishing his own zoo on the Channel Island of Jersey.

When the author is talking about animals, as he is most of the time in this record of a recent expedition to the plains of Patagonia, his book is fresh, shrewd and informative. Sometimes his observations are merely amusing: "A pygmy owl with round yellow eyes that glared at me with all the silent indignation of a vicar who, in the middle of the service, has discovered that the organist is drunk." At Durrell's best, they are more; in his description, for instance, of the stoic heroism of foraging penguins, he fills the reader with his own great love for the world's wonderful beasts.