Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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I understand the use of offensive words for effect, but it was excessive and there was no one who berated her for using them. However, as I read it, Fuller is merely describing how things really were: casual, and sometimes benevolent racism were the norm. I am not normally a fan or autobiographical writing, but this book is exceptional and I have been recommending it to everyone I know.

At first, it seemed that the entire book and the author herself would have laughed mockingly at that quaint desire for commonality. Here it is so hot that “the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire”. I read this book (well, most of it, I admit, I didn't finish and didn't want to) while in training as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Namibia, Africa. At times funny, at times tragic, at times eccentric, at times heroic, Fuller gives us a wonderful story told through the eyes of a gradually maturing child. Fuller has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers including the New Yorker Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Vogue and Granta Magazine.It is so hot outside that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire. By opting not to romanticize her family life, Fuller allowed her Mum, Dad, and older sister to shine as “hard-living, glamorous, intemperate, intelligent, racist, … taciturn, capable, [and] self-reliant. I loved the use of language, the strung-together adjectives and the powerful descriptions of the essence of Africa - the sheer enormity of the land, the harsh, unforgiving climate, the beauty that overwhelms the senses every single day. She unflinchingly describes her life and does not apologize for it nor cheapen it by gaudily harping on lessons she has learned.

Had Fuller chosen to whitewash or idealize her family life, she would have deprived them of this shared experience and been left with a cardboard cutout of the real thing. 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. Then my mind would wander to America, and how parents took their kids across it in covered wagons, and how dangerous that was because sometimes entire families were killed or died from starvation or other causes. As more black students and staff transfer in, a drought comes on and the students are made to share bathwater.Alexandra Fuller's story of her life as a child growing up in Rhodesia and various other East African countries in the late sixties, seventies and eighties is a gritty, uncompromising account of a family determined to continue in the colonial tradition of white farmers, despite the huge political and social changes occurring around them. Through her rich descriptions of sights and sounds we know that she truly loved this land of rich, pungent flora ad fauna. A German aid worker "is keen on saving the environment, which, until then, I had not noticed needed saving". They have free reign among scorpions, snakes, leopards, and baboons and they live in the middle of the Rhodesian war. Weekend holidays on the shores of Lake Malawi running wild with expats-like-us while burning to a crisp.

The adult Fuller includes enough details (her habitual childhood imperiousness to darker-skinned adults, those adults' dismay, then anger at her impossible harping) for us to understand exactly what is at stake, and also to let us understand the ironies. But it's not a gilded, ex-pat life: her parents lose their farm in forced land distribution, after which they are itinerant farm managers, who move where the work is, often to disease-ridden and war-torn areas.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of life with Alexandra Fuller and her family on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe. Besides, reading all the books about war, including the Second World War, the Holocaust events, the French Revolution, Africa and Asian wars, we can conclude that nobody should complain since the person standing next to you might have had it much worse (a thought from "Small Island" written by Andrea Levy). If Fuller's family and friends are any indication, it would appear that white people can only cope with African life through heavy boozing. Central to Fuller’s book is the intense relations between herself and her parents, a chain-smoking father able to turn round any farm in Africa, her glamorous older sister Vanessa, and the character who sits at the heart of the book, Fuller’s "fiercely intelligent, deeply compassionate, surprisingly witty and terrifyingly mad" mother. But when a rambunctiously itchy young Fuller shrilly demands that the two family servants examine her "on my downthere, man" to assess and relieve the itch, the servants take refuge by (entirely reasonably) feigning deafness.