When Alexandra "Bo" Fuller was in Zambia a few years ago visiting her parents, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him: "Curiosity scribbled the cat," he told Bo. Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian War. With the same fiercely beautiul prose that won her such acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her ...
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When Alexandra "Bo" Fuller was in Zambia a few years ago visiting her parents, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him: "Curiosity scribbled the cat," he told Bo. Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian War. With the same fiercely beautiul prose that won her such acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K. He is, seemingly, a man of contradictions. Tattooed, battle-scarred, and weathered by farm work, K is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life and welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, brutal tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians. Like all the veterans of the war, K has blood on his hands. Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way, by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse at life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere.
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Add this copy of Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier to cart. $17.71, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2005 by Penguin Publishing Group.
Alexandra Fuller has written another wonderful book about life in modern Africa.
She shows the reader the dark continent as it stands today, a beautiful, terrible, and frightening place.
My hat is off to the Africans, black and white, who have the resilience to live there through wars, famines, and droughts.
missanita
Mar 20, 2009
disapointed!
I read Don't lets go to the dogs and could not wait to read her next work. I found it was like reading someones stream of consciousness. I thought. It did not hold together and left many unanswered questions. What was she doing leaving her children and her husband to chase a dream of what? Alexandra was unclear about what she was trying to find out about herself. I found her to be somewhat lost in her writing and lost in her life, she did not appear to have found the answer in her story.
