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.
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The first book, a childhood memoir, brought the author's childhood experiences as a young white girl living on a farm in Rhodesia (and suffering through the Civil War) vividly to life; the new book has Alexandra Fuller (known as 'Bo') taking a journey to her parents' farm in Zambia and finding things very changed. She encounters the beguiling and attractive neighbour of her parents, 'K', who has lived life on the edge. He entrances Alexandra with descriptions of the turbulent life he has led, and the two form a bond, attempting to forge a shared approach to life and love in a land that is tearing itself apart with civil strife.
In her atmospheric and subtle prose, Fuller pulls off something of a juggling act here: while the relationship between herself and the conflicted, seductive 'K' is foregrounded, with every nuance of emotion between the two subtly delineated, the reader is simultaneously granted a picture of a country in strife that misses nary a detail in its careful but discursive line drawing. The author may have settled down to family life in Wyoming, but it's impossible not to feel that this was clearly the most significant period of her life--and her sharing of that time with the reader in this finely–honed book is something for which we may be grateful. --Barry Forshaw
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