Exp Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Softcover

Fuller, Alexandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143121863 ISBN 13: 9780143121862

Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2012

Synopsis

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness tells the story of the author's mother, Nicola Fuller. Nicola Fuller and her husband were a glamorous and optimistic couple and East Africa lay before them with the promise of all its perfect light, even as the British Empire in which they both believed waned. They had everything, including two golden children - a girl and a boy. However, life became increasingly difficult and they moved to Rhodesia to work as farm managers. The previous farm manager had committed suicide. His ghost appeared at the foot of their bed and seemed to be trying to warn them of something. Shortly after this, one of their golden children died. Africa was no longer the playground of Nicola's childhood. They returned to England where the author was born before they returned to Rhodesia and to the civil war. The last part of the book sees the Fullers in their old age on a banana and fish farm in the Zambezi Valley. They had built their ramshackle dining room under the Tree of Forgetfulness. In local custom, this tree is the meeting place for villagers determined to resolve disputes. It is in the spirit of this Forgetfulness that Nicola finally forgot - but did not forgive - all her enemies including her daughter and the Apostle, a squatter who has taken up in her bananas with his seven wives and forty-nine children. Funny, tragic, terrifying, exotic and utterly unself-conscious, this is a story of survival and madness, love and war, passion and compassion.

About this title

About the Author

ALEXANDRA FULLER was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming. She has three children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Praise for Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

 

“[E]lectrifying . . . Writing in shimmering, musical prose . . . Ms. Fuller manages the difficult feat of writing about her mother and father with love and understanding, while at the same time conveying the terrible human costs of the colonialism they supported. . . . Although Ms. Fuller would move to America with her husband in 1994, her own love for Africa reverberates throughout these pages, making the beauty and hazards of that land searingly real for the reader.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Ten years after publishing Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller treats us in this wonderful book to the inside scoop on her glamorous, tragic, indomitable mother. . . . Bobo skillfully weaves together the story of her romantic, doomed family against the background of her mother’s remembered childhood.”

—The Washington Post

“Another stunner . . . The writer’s finesse at handling the element of time is brilliant, as she interweaves near-present-day incidents with stories set in the past. Both are equally vivid. . . . With Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller, master memoirist, brings her readers new pleasure. Her mum should be pleased.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Fuller’s narrative is a love story to Africa and her family. She plumbs her family story with humor, memory, old photographs, and a no-nonsense attitude toward family foibles, follies, and tragedy. The reader is rewarded with an intimate family story played out against an extraordinary landscape, told with remarkable grace and style.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Fuller] conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“[A]n artistic and emotional feat.”

—The Boston Globe

“[An] eccentric, quixotic, and downright dangerous tale with full room for humor, love, and more than a few highballs.”

—The Huffington Post

“Cocktail Hour [Under the Tree of Forgetfulness] subtly explores the intersections of personality, history, and landscape in ways that are continually fresh and thoughtful.”

—Charleston Post and Courier

“Gracefully recounted using family recollections and photos, the author plumbs the narrative with a humane and clear-eyed gaze—a lush story, largely lived within a remarkable place and time.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“In this sequel to her 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, which her unflattered mum calls the ‘Awful Book,’ Duller gives a warm yet wry account of her British parents’ arduous life in Africa. . . . With searing honesty and in blazingly vibrant prose, Fuller re-creates her mother’s glorified Kenyan girlhood and visits her forever-wild parents at their Zambian banana and fish farm today. The result is an entirely Awesome Book.”

—More Magazine

“Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir.”

—BookPage

“Fuller revisits her vibrant, spirited parents, first introduced in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), which her mother referred to as that ‘awful book’. . . . This time around, Nicola is well aware her daughter is writing another memoir, and shares some of her memories under the titular Tree of Forgetfulness, which looms large by the elder Fullers’ house in Zambia. Fuller’s prose is so beautiful and so evocative that readers will feel that they, too, are sitting under that tree. A gorgeous tribute to both her parents and the land they love.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“A sardonic follow-up to her first memoir about growing up in Rhodesia circa the 1970s, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, this work traces in wry, poignant fashion the lives of her intrepid British parents. . . . Fuller achieves another beautifully wrought memoir.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

PENGUIN BOOKS

COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her mid-twenties. In 1994 she moved to Wyoming, where she now resides.

For Charlie—guide extraordinaire—with my love

Table of Contents

Praise for Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Cast of Main Characters

 

PART ONE

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly

Nicola Huntingford Is Born

Nicola Fuller and the Fancy Dress Parties

Roger Huntingford’s War

Nicola Huntingford Learns to Ride

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Goes to Her High School Reunion

Nicola Huntingford, the Afrikaner and the Perfect Horse

Nicola Huntingford and the Mau Mau

 

PART TWO

Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode

Nicola Fuller and the Perfect House

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round One

Nicola Fuller in England

Nicola Fuller in Rhodesia: Round Two

Olivia

Nicola Fuller and the End of Rhodesia

 

PART THREE

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa and the Tree of Forgetfulness

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa at Home

 

Acknowledgments

Appendix - Nicola Fuller of Central Africa: The Soundtrack

Glossary

CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS

Nicola Christine Victoria Fuller née Huntingford—the author’s mother, also known as Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, Mum or Tub

Timothy Donald Fuller—the author’s father, also known as Dad

Vanessa Margaret Fuller—the author’s sister, also known as Van

Edith Margaret Belfinley Huntingford née Macdonald—the author’s maternal grandmother, also known as Granny or Donnie or Mrs. Huntingford

Roger Lowther Huntingford—the author’s maternal grandfather, also known as Hodge

Glennis Duthie—the author’s maternal aunt, also known as Auntie Glug or Glug

Sandy Duthie—the author’s maternal uncle by marriage

Donald Hamilton Connell-Fuller—the author’s paternal grandfather

Ruth Henrietta Fuller—the author’s paternal grandmother, also known as Boofy

Tony Fuller—the author’s paternal uncle, also known as Uncle Toe

Alexandra Fuller—the author, also known as Bo or Bobo

PART ONE

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

 

—KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly

Mkushi, Zambia, circa 1986

Mum in an Eldoret theatrical production. Kenya, circa 1963.

 

Our Mum—or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself—has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

“At least she didn’t read you Shakespeare in the womb,” my sister says. “I think that’s what gave me brain damage.”

“You do not have brain damage,” I say.

“That’s what Mum says.”

“Well, I wouldn’t listen to her. You know what she’s like,” I say.

“I know,” Vanessa says.

“For example,” I say, “lately, she’s been telling me that I must have been switched at birth.”

“Really?” Vanessa tilts her head this way and that to get a better view of my features. “Let me have a look at your nose from the other side.”

“Stop it,” I cover my nose.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143121863
• ISBN 13: 9780143121862
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304