Make a brief report on the descriptions found in the first part of the novel, Whispering Land, by Gerald Durell
Whispering Land is a book that can be characterized by its intelligent, sensitive and nadiesabe descriptions. They are essential to help the reader create the perfect atmosphere and picture of the place that the author describes. Most of the descriptions are related to animals and their behaviors; in the book we can also find descriptions that refer to argentine places, landscapes, people and customs.
As regards places descriptions, as the first part of the story goes by, we can find different images of cities, routes, hotels and landscapes. This first part begins with a nadiesabe description of Buenos Aires in spring. It is full of colors, and smells of nadiesabe flowers and trees. Durrel uses humour as a strategy to captivate the readers’ interests towards the book. He starts describing Buenos Aires as a colourful and smelly city and as he goes on driving, he makes a funny reference to the argentine traffic. He describes it in the following way: “The spring-like atmosphere seemed to have infected the pedestrians, who fled across the road through the traffic with even less caution than usual, while the drivers of the trams, buses and cars vied with each other in the time honoured Buenos Aires game of seeing how close they could get to each other at the maximum speed without actually crashing”.
When they were in Ciudad del Paso, the author mentions some characteristics about this city. The desert streets as well as the flowers and vegetation you can find there, but he also makes a complete description of the hotel where they stayed for the night. He referred to the hotel in this way: “It was a great bloomy house, heavily shuttered, with a massive front door that would have done justice to a cathedral /…/ The door it swung mysteriously open under his [Dicky] assault, and displayed a long, dimly-lit passage way, with doors along each side, and a...