Tom Michell is a self-described callow youth when he arrives in Argentina in the 1970s to teach in a boys’ boarding school, “a country boy from the gentle Downs of rural Sussex” who is unprepared for life under Isabel Perón’s government, and the threat of a military coup. But The Penguin Lessons isn’t a history book, or a travelogue, either, although it does touch on politics and on Michell’s explorations: it’s the story of how, on one of his journeys, he found an oil-drenched penguin on the beach in Punta del Este in Uruguay, and smuggled it back to his school.
Michell sees just one penguin alive amid a scene of devastation, hundreds of birds lying dead in the sand “from the high water mark to the sea and stretching far away along the shore to the north”. He decides he has to save this one bird, and manages to transport it back to the flat where he’s staying. “I couldn’t dream up a more unsuitable place for cleaning a tar-sodden penguin,” he writes, before carefully immobilising it and setting to work with various products, “ butter and margarine, olive oil and cooking oil, soap, shampoo and detergent”.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment