Later, as she journeys through Zimbabwe, she shows again that, though she is white, she is every bit an African. "Sole," she writes, "had been so parched that its surface curled back like a dried tongue and exposed red, bony gums of erosion". The African landscape once again is so powerfully evoked that it plays the role of a principal character. In Scribbling the Cat, her parents are here again, now running a fish farm in Sole Valley in Zambia and dottier than ever. One life surely cannot contain another story as dramatic and poignant as that which she has already told.
The book won prizes - here and in the States where Fuller now lives - and was a word-of-mouth best seller.Īfter such a debut, Fuller is inevitably facing an uphill struggle with her second book, especially as she has chosen to write another first-person tale of Africa. It is one of those books that convince you that some writers have a God-given gift for words which the rest of us jealously labour away to approach but never quite equal. Three of Fuller's siblings died young, one - in the book's most compelling but almost unbearable section - drowning in a duck pond while in the care of the young Alexandra.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of growing up with feckless but charming settler parents in white Rhodesia as it became Zimbabwe, evoked place and people and pain with spare but exquisite prose.
Alexandra Fuller produced in 2002 one of finest books I have read in the past decade, if not ever.
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