Synopses & Reviews
Best-selling memoirist Alexandra Fuller travels with a strangely charismatic Rhodesian war veteran into a modern-day heart of darkness.
When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, 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; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." 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 beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.
K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he 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 more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians and K, like all the veterans of the war, 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. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of 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.
Scribbling the Cat is an engrossing and haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.
Review
"A worried, restless, and haunted piece of work, tattooed and scarred from beginning to end." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"[U]nflinching...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, Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"One of the strangest, best books ever about the ravages of war." Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
Review
"Scribbling the Cat is an unflinching look at the scars inflicted by war, but it's also a masterfully written travelogue. Fuller's portrait of the African landscape where 'the air seemed softly boiling with song' is so entrancing that her reader yearns to experience it, even as K describes the atrocities it once hosted." Outside Magazine
Review
"Scribbling the Cat may be read as a love story from Africa, baring its own troubled history page by fascinating page...It is Fuller's hallucinatory yet rock-solid narrative that lends Scribbling the Cat its unforgettable power and its vivid, thought provoking charms." Elle
Review
"[I]n the end, this is a beautiful and powerfully moving account that gives us some insight into the tragedy of Africa today. If curiosity scribbled (that is, killed) the cat, then let yourself be scribbled. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Synopsis
With the same disarmingly unguarded prose that won her critical acclaim for Dont Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller tells of her unusual friendship with Ka white African and veteran of the brutal, racially divided Rhodesian War. An engrossing and haunting tale of love, godliness, hate, war, and survival, Scribbling the Cat recounts the journey she makes with K into the lands that hold the scars of their war, from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and into Mozambique. Driven by memories, they venture deeper into the countries remote bush, where they encounter other veterans and survivors and confront the demons of Ks past: a violent war marked by racial strife, jungle battles, torture, and the murdering of innocent civilians.
Synopsis
When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, 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; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." 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 beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.
K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he 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 more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civiliansandmdash;and K, like all the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands.
Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal wayandmdash;by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of 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.
Scribbling the Cat is an engrossing and haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.
About the Author
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969 and in 1972 she moved with her family to a farm in Rhodesia. After that country's civil war in 1981, the Fullers moved first to Malawi, then to Zambia. Fuller's first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, was a national best-seller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2002, and a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and was chosen the BookSense Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2002.