Rating: 
Summary: A book that makes you think.
Review:
i just got back from Zimbabwe and I don't think Mrs. Fuller is exagerating the experience she had in Southern Africa on this trip. The book is surreal because the country, the experience of the disenfranchised minority of white Zimbabweans and the remaining effects of the war are still being felt. The result of Mugabe's recent attempts to hold onto political power by making farmers and his political opponents the enemy has plunged the country into inflation of about 6000 Zim to 1 US dollar. Her language, the local Zim phrasing, the words used to discribe the birds calls all make the experience more real and alive. But the book is about more than biography but about war and how it effects individual people. I listenened to it on tape with a Vietnam vet who recognized many of the feelings expressed. Those who accuse Mrs Fuller of explioting K ignore the fact that she is honest enough to share her own mistakes and frailties. I would recomment this book highly.
Rating: 
Summary: Read Don't Let's Go first
Review: After finishing Scribbling the Cat, the reader comes away with a history and an understanding of why it was important for Fuller to write this story. In her signature way, it's honest, interesting and she tells the story without judgement---which is why her writing is so compelling. However, if this book had been written before Don't Let's Go, most readers would not have been compelled to read futher. I think because it is a sort of travel log, it lacks that compelling pull of what happens next because what changes and what is learned is internal within the people in the story. But that being said, if a reader has an interest in Africa, Fuller's life lends us a keen eye to life inside. Read Don't Let's Go first is my only advice
Rating:
Summary: Masterful, Few Write with such command as Fuller
Review: From reading Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight we expect excruciating honesty. We certainly get that in Scribbling the Cat but here Fuller also holds back as much as she reveals. While other reviewers find this dishonest, or even immoral, I think much of the understated tension in the story between Fuller and K provides bold richness to the narrative. It is obvious that Fuller is holding back. That this author can do this (for more often than not she uses words like a scalpel to scrape away at the layers of reality to get to the core, and can lay bare a character till we feel we are viewing an x-ray) is a testimony to her genius. We see Fuller experiencing the Africa of K, and the enigma of K himself, while holding a vital strain from the reader: why, beyond the similarities of their common heritage, is K so intriguing to her? Little hints are scattered through the book, like the bread Hansel uses to mark his way back home: on pg 137 of the hardcover K informs Fuller that his ex-wife had an affair, and says "'she was possessed. What else can make a woman do what she did?' I puffed hard on my cigarette and said nothing." Here, Fuller the writer is holding back her cards. At moments like this, Fuller saying nothing is almost as good as Fuller providing us with a thousand words. Later, K seems to get at Fuller's essential core when he says "You play with men. You know that? You play with men and you play with their feelings and you are going to destroy yourself. You are going to destroy your family." That Fuller allows K to utter this (whether she believes it or not) is gutsy and intriguing. As is the quote she puts in her own mouth "Why do I push people to destruction?" After Fuller and K argue about her brief moment of intimacy with Mapenga [which Fuller tells us was only kissing, but lasted "some minutes"] Fuller explains the reconciliation with K as "The routine of tea, the casual domesticity, the drying underwear on the fence, the unfed cat, the two-o'clock-in the morning quarrels, and the implied apology, the unwashed dishes. From a distance, whatever this was could easily be mistaken for a marriage." Fuller and K in fact become a husband and wife and their intimacy is so complete in its intensity that its physical consummation is irrelevant. We see two people, like naked souls, trying desperately, through the medium of their individual lives, to understand what it is to be alive. If this is not intimacy, what is? The theme of this book is the civil war in Rhodesia and the effect it had on K, his comrades and Fuller. But an understated element is there as well, getting dragged along like a shadow. We have a writer pushing the outer envelope of experience to get at something essential. She is fearless in pursuing K regardless of where it takes her. And the reader of this book feels almost voyeuristic as the elements put into the book (and those left out!) give the startling appearance that real life is unfolding before us; it is ugly, it is pretty, it is grave and disgusting, but a feeling of absolute veracity strings all these elements along - and the result is mesmerizing. Ultimately, for me, this book is about how to craft an excellent book: what to put in, what to leave out, and how to explain life without reducing its mystery.
I think Alexandra Fuller is a masterful writer.
Rating:
Summary: This painful book is important reading
Review: I don't know what to say; rather, I have too much to say. I didn't grow up in a godforsaken war zone as Fuller did in Africa but I was neck-deep and more in the colonial environment of Panama. This book cut me to the quick. Even without my background, however, the book is a special compilation of pages that very much need to be read. It's an unusual and amazing book; a reminder of how humanity stretches and can be brought to the edge of redemption before it knows it's not quite human any more. This book will be on my end-of-year Best Books list, no question. Even though I still am flumoxed by its contents. Which, I think was the writer's point. In which case, she done just fine.
Rating:
Summary: A book about "Life, Death, Love, Hate and God...."
Review: I read this book almost two years after reading this author's first book, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" which was one of my all time favorite books. I don't believe Ms. Fuller's intent was for this book to be taken as literally as some readers seem to taking it. Don't look for flaws in facts. She purposely said she was "covering her tracks" like "any good soldier" would do. I loved this book almost as much as her first book. That says a lot. She is a wonderful writer. Her marriage is her own business to those reviewers who blame her for not discussing it more in this book. Obviously anyone concerned about her marriage or the factual flaws do not get the reason for this book. This book is not meant to provide answers. Instead, it simply propounds more questions for the reader to contemplate. Authors that imply that they have all the answers bore me to no end. Perhaps that's why I love Ms. Fuller's writing so much. She has no such egotistical pretense in her writing. Instead, this book is about much, much more than the seemingly dry subject of traveling through various parts of Africa with an ex-soldier. This book is about "Life, Death, Love, Hate and God" among other even less tangible things. I loved it and will read it again. Thank you again, Ms. Fuller, for another wonderful book about your experiences in Africa. We seem to share some experiences of living in a place that does not make often make sense or fit into other person's scope of reality. Your writing sometimes reminds me of what it's like to live in the Virgin Islands, a subject I hope to write about one day as eloquently as you write about Africa.
Rating: 
Summary: Sadistic and confusing
Review: I was very unclear about how to rate this book. It's brilliantly written and about a subject -- the brutality of the war in Rhodesia and the human fallout from it -- that we don't know much about in the US. It's an amazing, up-close picture of a desolate part of Africa, that is nonetheless teeming with life and interesting individuals.
But there is a kind of patent dishonesty going on here that clouds the book's best intentions and the author's considerable storytelling gifts. The story is straightforwardly presented as authobiographical, but Ms. Fuller is incredibly stingy with revealing herself (while she virtually guts her subject, the former White Rhodesian soldier she calls "K"). In order to get "K" to open up to her and tell his absolutely wrenching, devasting story, Ms. Fuller manipulates him in an unusually cruel way -- she allows him to fall in love with her (even though she is a married woman with two children back in the US) and continues her deception throughout a long road trip, during which he confides his darkest secrets to her, believing that she is "the one" -- the perfect mate sent to him by God to heal his loneliness and his pain.
Although the stories of military violence, racism and horrific African poverty are deeply affecting, I was profoundly disturbed at the way Alexandra Fuller obtained K's life story. In many respects, she hurt and victimized this terribly damaged man in ways that are psychologically worse than violence -- by betraying his trust. (When I was in high school, there was a not-very-nice term for women who use their sexuality to keep men on a string.) Furthermore, Ms. Fuller is coy enough not to let us know if the attraction was at all mutual or what the state of her marriage was. After all, she has left her husband and children back in Wyoming...it matters a great deal to the reader if she is purely a writer in search of a story (however manipulative) or if she is actually a unhappy wife looking for a potential lover. This unspoken story nagged at me, especially the last part of the book where Ms. Fuller actively begins a flirtacious relationship with ANOTHER ex-soldier...basically trivializing not only her mysterious marriage but her confusing relationship to "K".
The last time I was so distracted from the content of a non-fiction book by the actions of the author was Kathryn Harrison's "The Kiss", about that author's adult love affair with her own biological father. As bad as incest is, somehow Alexandra Fuller's deceptive and cruel manipulation of "K" to get a clever and unusual story bothers me even more. Certainly it should make the reader think about just how far it is reasonable or moral for a writer to go to obtain material for a book...does the fact that "K" had a truly fascinating story to tell mean that it was OK to use him and to break his heart?
In conclusion, I found this story to be sadistic and disturbing, although the author is a fine writer and superb storyteller, she has a lot of work to do in developing a conscience.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps not a book so much about Africa or War, but People.
Review: I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked this book up, but was looking for a change of pace. Unlike most of the readers here, I haven't actually read the other book of hers. It was simply something different.So the book starts off rather charming. People wandering around Africa (Zambia, I suppose) and just describing the absurdity of the condition. Describing the landscape and the people. I enjoyed that. A refreshing change. As it continues, we actually begin to notice ... what aren't really flaws in the Author's character so much as, well, as the Amazon reviewer put it, craters. You start to see that both the people (K and the Author) are fairly scarred and unhappy people. This goes on, and the unhappiness really increases substantially. I found the book to have gone from charming and lighthearted to depressing and rather bleak. This, perhaps intentionally, seems to coincide with the landscape. We start off in Zambia at the downright comical parents' fish farm, and continue to a somewhat bleaker K's home, and then back to the States, thoroughly unhappy and indeed missing everything in Africa, and then it gets really unpleasant -- lost in the African outback, being chased by a pet Lion (!), and so on. So while it might be hard to finish, as the change is so drastic (although mercifully slow), like other art, it is sometimes painful, and we as readers are compelled to do so. As another reviewer mentioned, there just isn't a hollywood ending. It ends. There isn't anything tied up or completed, the threads of the book remain, sadly, frayed. That, however, I suppose, is the Author's point. I'd been trying to decide between 3 and 4 stars for the book, and erred on the side of 4. I'd probably read it again, but I'd make sure to do it at a time when I wasn't looking for anything pleasant or uplifting.
Rating:
Summary: Very well written
Review: I've found this very informative, as I have just started learning about Rhodesia, with only small tidbits from old SOFs
Rating: 
Summary: Fantasy?
Review: Like others, I have some experience of the War in "Rhodesia" and, like others, I have some suspicion of the veracity of the tales told by Mz Fuller. I don't know if "K" was pulling her leg or she misheard him, but some of the incidents recounted fail on the "ring of truth" test and the application of plain logic.
Rating:
Summary: Readers will be both pleased & disappointed
Review: Readers of Fuller's first book, Don't Lets Go..., will likely be both pleased and disappointed with Scribbling The Cat. Fuller has lost none of the poetic earthiness and honesty that makes her work so delicious. Sadly, the story line seems somewhat lacking in substance, given the complexity and gravity of the war. Readers are provided with a only a vague itinerary (Mozambique battlefields) and only the briefest thumbnail sketch of the conflicts' major events. Also missing is the charm of Fuller's own innocence. Unlike her first book, birth and fate are not why she finds herself in precarious circumstances. Rather, it's her own questionable judgment and admitted desire to push the envelope. Nevertheless, the characters are memorable, and once again Fuller brings to life the land in all its sensory glory. The book reads like a gifted-but-underachieving student's school report. As if she attempted to overcome a dearth of solid research by relying heavily on descriptive talent...B+
|
