Scribbling the Cat
- Book Review,
by Alexandra Fuller
Amazon.com
Thomas Wolfe's trusted axiom about not being able to go home again gets a compelling spin through the African veldt in Alexandra Fuller's Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier. Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight : An African Childhood) journeys through modern Zambia, to battlefields in Zimbabwe and Mozambique with the scarred veteran of the Rhodesian Wars she identifies only as "K." Intrigued by the mysterious neighbor of her parent's Zambian fish farm and further enticed by her father's warning that "curiosity scribbled the cat" ("scribbling" is Afrikaans slang for "killing"), Fuller embarks on a journey that covers as much cratered psychic landscape as it does African bush country. Though she and "K" are both African by family roots rather than blood, she quickly discovers that 30 years of civil war have scarred them--and the indigenous peoples they encounter--in markedly different ways. "K" is a figure of monumental tragedy, a decent man torn by war-fueled rage, a failed marriage, and painful memories of an only son lost to tropical disease. His adopted Christianity offers him only partial absolution, and Fuller details his gut-wrenching confessions of quarter-century old atrocities with compassion and rare insight. Her prose liberally salted with a rich, melange of Afrikaans and local Shona slang, Fuller nonetheless struggles with a narrative whose turns are often unexpected, yet driven by humanity. There's a clear sense that the author's fitful journey into the past with "K" has opened as many wounds as it has healed, and spawned more questions than it has answered. It's that discomfort and frustration that often reinforces the honesty of her prose--and reinforces Thomas Wolfe's adage yet again. --Jerry McCulley
From Publishers Weekly
Memoirist Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) describes this book, about her friendship with a Rhodesian war veteran, as "a slither of a slither of a much greater story." This disclaimer doesn't excuse the book's thinness, as it traces Fuller's journey with the white ex-soldier, K, from his farm in Zambia through Zimbabwe and into Mozambique, to the battlefields of more than two decades ago. Fuller evokes place and character with the vivid prose that distinguished her unflinching memoir of growing up in Africa, but here she handles subject matter that warrants more than artful word painting and soul-searching. Writing about warâ€"its scarred participants, victims and territoryâ€"Fuller skimps on the history and politics that have shaped her and her subjects. Her personal enmeshment with K is the story's core. She's enamored of his physical beauty and power, and transfixed by his contradictions: K's capacity for both violence and emotional vulnerability, his anger and generosity, the blood on his hands and the faith he relies on (he's a born-again Christian) to cope with his demons. Fuller becomes K's confessor, and the journey turns into a kind of penance for her complicity, as a white girl in the 1970s, in a war of white supremacy. When K recounts how he tortured an African girl, Fuller swallows nausea and thinks, "I am every bit that woman's murderer." Fuller and K embark on their road trip ostensibly for the shell-shocked man to get beyond his "spooks" and for Fuller to write about it, but this motivation makes for a rather static journey. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
On a Christmas visit to her parents' fish farm in Zambia a few years ago, Alexandra Fuller first heard talk of a mysterious neighbor, a white African veteran of the Rhodesian War of the 1970s whom her father described as a "tough bugger." The man whom Fuller calls K happened by her parents' farm the next morning -- and she was immediately fascinated. "Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily beautiful, but in a careless, superior way, like a dominant lion or an ancient fortress. . . . He looked like he was his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation -- a living, walking, African Vatican City. . . . He looked cathedral." He was also the embodiment of the white minority oppressors who ruled Rhodesia until a nationalist uprising led to its becoming, in 1980, black-ruled Zimbabwe. The author's curiosity about K grew into an obsession, and as his contradictions emerge, it becomes clear why. A racist and a war criminal with a penchant for shocking violence, K was simultaneously a born-again Christian and a good Samaritan (he once rescued a nanny from the jaws of a crocodile) who had sworn off alcohol, ran a medical clinic and easily burst into emotional tears. Fans of Fuller's bestselling debut memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, an often outrageous account of her white African childhood, can expect some of the same searing, at times intoxicating, prose in Scribbling the Cat. But while her portrait of K is striking, intimately revealing a soul tormented by specters of war and guilt and loss, the book on the whole is unsatisfying. It is based on a contrived premise and results in an anemic narrative.The premise, conceived by Fuller, was that she and K would travel over his old battlefields of more than 20 years ago -- from Zambia through Zimbabwe and into Mozambique. K would face his ghosts, and she would write about the journey. The tour essentially served its purpose, stirring in K a series of dark recollections -- which are usually far more interesting than the trip itself -- and ushering this unlikely pair into the company of a cast of eccentric and unstable characters (including an old war buddy of K's who lives alone on an island with an untamed lion). A strange, pained friendship grew between them, and it became colored by K's sexual attraction to Fuller; their already precarious relationship nearly fractured after her brief flirtation with another veteran.Fuller can flat out write, and her rousing portrayals of the African landscape and the people and creatures that inhabit it can, as in her last book, rise to the level of lyricism:"Out here, beyond the reach of the electric glare that spread from the rondaval, the witching darkness was so turbulent and vaporous with freshly hatched life and with its immediate contemporaries, death and decay, that the air seemed softly boiling with song, and with rustling wings and composting bodies." It is one of Fuller's great assets that she does not soften or shy away from the unseemly or the uncomfortable or the self-incriminating. But in at least one instance, she greatly exaggerates her own complicity in an ostensible attempt to draw parallels between herself and her subject. After hearing K recount how he had brutally tortured an African teenage girl who later died of her injuries, Fuller says she thought: "This was my war too. . . . I was every bit that woman's murderer." That's a lot of guilt to assume, given that Fuller was a small child at the time. This book is steeped in a medley of other vexing issues -- from the anguish of veterans living with their sins to the elusiveness of faith to the possibility of redemption. Fuller tries mightily to fathom K, but, with a few exceptions, refrains from judging him and the other veterans she encountered. Some readers may question whether she adequately deals with the pervasive racism that motivates these men. In short, while it has several intense passages, Scribbling the Cat suffers from a slack story line -- a deficiency that will be all the more apparent to those who have read Fuller's stunning first book. Instead we are given a leisurely procession of anecdotes and musings that nonetheless illuminate the restless, haunted, often maniacal world of men whose wars still churn inside them. Reviewed by Adam Fifield Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Author of the highly acclaimed memoir Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight, Fuller has developed a masterful prose style; the Kansas City Star calls her “powerful as a lion on the move.” But lions aren’t known for their self-reflection, and this is where Scribbling the Cat runs into trouble. Fuller willingly accepts her share of K’s guilt. However, she doesn’t truly change her view of herself, her people, or her homeland. And she leaves the reader with some troubling questions—why, for instance, did she leave her family to travel with the unpredictable K? Some critics praise Fuller for her refusal to offer pat conclusions. However, many find this refusal maddening, even irresponsible. For a hair-raising tour of Africa, there’s no better guide than Fuller. Just don’t expect many answers.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Fuller, whose powerful memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001) told the story of her family's life before and during the Rhodesian civil war, returned to Africa to follow a soldier in that war and relive the past. On a trip to the Sole Valley in Zambia, where her parents now live, Fuller met K, a white farmer who fought in the Rhodesian war. Lonely, tormented K is drawn to Fuller, and in turn Fuller is interested in the story of his life and how the war shaped him. Her fascination with him leads her to ask him to travel to Mozambique to revisit the places he fought in; his fascination with her leads him to say yes. And so begins their journey, where K's demons are indeed uncovered and Fuller learns more about him and his past than she bargained for. "You can't rewind war," Fuller writes, "It spools on, and on . . and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place." Fuller's unflinching look at K, war, and even herself makes for an extremely powerful book, one that takes readers into a complex, deep-seated, and ongoing conflict and sees through to its heart. Fuller is a truly gifted and insightful writer. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Kirkus Reviews, starred review, May 1, 2004
A worried, restless, and haunted piece of work, tattooed and scarred from beginning to end.
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