Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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First off, I would say that this is not my usual reading material, which tends to be either cookery books or nasty, grisly Mark Billingham-esque murder mysteries.

The Fullers are white and apparently upper middle class, but heavily in debt (though they manage to pay school fees). From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller--known to friends and family as Bobo--grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her feel for dialogue (naturally reconstructed, but incredibly realistic) is outstanding and her rendering of a child's understanding of language is superb.

Fuller weaves her story back and forth between an intimate portrait of her family and the violence surrounding them. She did a masterful job creating distinct realistic voices with multiple accents to distinguish between the different ages, genders, and nationalities found within the stories. I won’t try to describe them – I couldn’t do them justice, and besides, you should go read the book. I understand the use of offensive words for effect, but it was excessive and there was no one who berated her for using them.

I read "Cocktail hour under the tree of Forgetfulness" first, and found this book too repetitive - although it was written first. This is the story of her childhood as a farming family in what originally was a country ran by whites under British rule through the revolution where Rhodesia became Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s control. The memoirs of the childhood of a white girl (Alexandra, known as Bobo), raised on African farms in the 1970s and 1980s, along with her sister, Van(essa). When I left Africa, I left the book behind for someone else to read (reading material is in short supply for PCV's) and didn't mind a lick that I hadn't finished it. I also really wanted to delve deep into the Fullers reasons for wanting to live on a continent that they found so inhospitable--both in terms of terrain and in terms of constant violence they encountered.As she described each stage of her upbringing, I found myself thinking about what I had been doing at that same age and marveling that the two of us could possibly have occupied the same world at the same time. I don’t enjoy immersing myself amid characters that are depressed, lost, or unmoored, so there were a couple of points where I might have abandoned the book had it not been for the funny, personable dialogue of the children trying to make sense of their conditions and the emotions of the adults. After the central tragedy of the book, Fuller’s mother goes from being a “fun drunk to a crazy sad drunk”, and Fuller feels responsible for that too.

The closest Fuller comes to a commentary on racism is when telling about her boarding school desegregating. I DID enjoy some parts of the story, I thought her family were colourful and although it was a bit dark at times, humorous too. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is about living through a civil war; it's about losing children and losing that war - and realising that the side you have been fighting for may well be the 'wrong' one. I read an article by a book reviewer a little while ago in which they talked about how sick they were of "growing up in fill-in-the-blank" books and wished people would be more original. But my friend, who is a teacher, and who lives part time in Africa teaching English at a school she had started, recommended it.It is perhaps closer to misery lit, although the tone is mostly light, and the worst episodes glossed over. On her brief conversion: “Once (when drunk) at a neighbor’s house I take the conversation-chilling opportunity to profess to the collected company that I love Jesus. The rainy season that brought with it gray solid sheets of water which rendered roads as thick and sticky as porridge. Alexandra Fuller took me on an amazing journey through her younger years growing up in Africa as a poor white girl. What makes Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight an outstanding memoir was Fuller's interesting choice to tell the story of growing up as an "expat-like-us" in Africa from a child's POV and the fact she did not tie herself to recounting her childhood in a linear manner.