Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - Hardcover

Fuller, Alexandra

3.96

55,250 ratings by Goodreads

9780330490238: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330490230 ISBN 13: 9780330490238

Publisher: Picador, 2002

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Stunning childhood memoir - if you like Andrea Ashworth or Barbara Kingsolver you'll love this.In 1972, when Alexandra Fuller was two years old, her parents finally abandoned their English life and returned to what was then Southern Rhodesia, and to the beginning of a civil war. By the time she is eight, the war is in full swing; her parents veer from being determined farmers to being blind drunk whilst the author and her sister, the only survivors of five children, alternately take up target practice and sing Rod Stewart numbers from sunbleached rocks.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. Unflinching, beautifully written, and, at times, extremely funny, Alexandra Fuller's book is one of the most honest memoirs of a childhood to be found in contemporary writing.'A classic is born . . . Like Anne Frank's diary,. this work captures the tone of a very young person caught up in her own small world as she witnesses a far larger historical event.'PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

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Review:

Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight is a wonderfully evocative memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s African childhood. Fuller regards herself "as a daughter of Africa", who spent her early life on farms in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia throughout the turbulent 1970s and 80s, as her parents "fought to keep one country in Africa white-run", but "lost twice" in Kenya and Zimbabwe. This is a profoundly personal story about growing up with a pair of funny, tough, white African settlers, and living with their "sometimes breathlessly illogical decisions", as they move from war-torn Zimbabwe to disease and malnutrition in Malawi, and finally the "beautiful and fertile" land of Zambia.

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.

Fuller weaves together painful family tragedy with a wider understanding of the ambivalence of being part of a separatist white farming community in the midst of Black African independence. The majority of the book focuses on Fuller’s early years in war-torn Zimbabwe, with "more history stuffed into its make-believe, colonial-dream borders than one country the size of a very large teapot should be able to amass." This is the most successful dimension of the book, as Fuller describes growing up on farm where her father is away most nights fighting "terrorists", and stripping a rifle takes precedence over school lessons. The sections on Malawi and Zambia are more prosaic, but this is a lyrical and accomplished memoir about Africa, which is "about adjusting to a new world view" and the author’s "passionate love for a continent that has come to define, shape, scar and heal me and my family." --Jerry Brotton

Review:

As unflinching and honestly told as any White African dares write... ultimately ...a love letter to a continent and its people who will never reciprocate. -- Richard E Grant, author of Withnails

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