About this deal
And again whilst I liked the switching viewpoint thing I found that a little confusing at times as you end up trying to work out where Packham actually is in the text.
Description: Chris Packham is a naturalist, nature photographer and author, best known for his television work. Unlike any memoir I've read; written as if it were at the same time a novel and a journal, it clearly was a deep source of catharsis.But when he stole a young Kestrel from its nest, he was about to embark on a friendship that would teach him what it meant to love, and that would change him forever. Chris takes a kestrel from its nest, forming an all-consuming friendship which will eventually teach him hard lessons about love and loss. I can appreciate his interest in the natural world as I too had a (somewhat smaller) collection of skulls, birds eggs and the like in my bedroom and saved my money for binoculars for bird watching, but not to the extent of his obsessions. This book dips into Chris Packham’s childhood from the age of about five to about sixteen but at the end of each chapter there is a shorter account from his forties (the early 2000s) and these later accounts of conversations with… , well you read the book, are unnerving and dark.
It’s the most powerful, honest account I’ve ever read about how nature can shape a person and how interactions with wildlife can stay with someone for ever.
This is a raw, strange, mesmerising book; an impressionistic take on Packham’s life and the natural world that transformed it. The interests that make him detached from others as he lives in an almost solitary world of natural wonder. Loved Dara’s review and the book itself bits of it were hard to read but it was well worth the effort Chris laid a lot of himself bare for all to see in this book and it is all the better for it, not sure though that I could do that, not in written form anyway. Weirdly, for all I recognised the story, I only teared up at the acknowledgements, not least for the way they admitted that the family who'd seemed so antagonistic to his younger self were in fact both loving and extraordinarily patient. Fingers in the Sparkle Jar: A Memoir is well written and highly original: non-linear, multiple points of view, and rooted in Chris's Asperger's Syndrome condition.
I found the whole thing powerful and evocative, a very personal account of nature’s wonders and the perils of being different as a child. And so I suppose I’m asking, that you forgive any potential nonsense I may inadvertently type, on what I do appreciate to be a brilliant, serious and sensible blog.
Sadly, some of the material is unsuitable for younger readers (sexual content and strong language), which is a shame, as an edited version of this book would be perfect for studying in schools to help encourage tolerance and understanding toward those on the autistic spectrum. Packham has a thing for adjectives and spends his time creating magical scenes and situations with very little in the way of concrete narrative in between.