Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Product Information

Here the land is “softly voluptuously fertile and sweet smelling of khaki weed, and old cow manure and thin dust and msasa leaves”. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 2002, Alexandra Fuller's classic memoir of an African childhood is suffused with laughter and warmth even amid disaster. If I had to give concrete criticisms of the book, the main one would be that she doesn't develop any characters outside of her immediately family (in fact, it seemed her family didn't have any substantial relationships with anyone, other than each other), and even those characters could use a bit more context. Deciding to read more memoirs again, I picked up Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (first read about 6 or 7 years ago). The author did an excellent job of plucking out the most memorable moments to produce a flowing narrative.

OK, I couldn't live there but this author made me love Africa and that is strange because it has so many problems, there is so much wrong, so much that has to be fixed. Bobo feels neither African (where she spends most of her childhood) nor British (where she was born). This is probably unsettling for readers who come face-to-face with her family's colonialist attitudes and expect to hear her criticize and critique them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

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 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. A classic memoir that conjures up all the sights, sounds, smells and feelings of an Africa on the cusp of a colonial to postcolonial transition. The latter was effective since Fuller doesn't get bogged down in the day-to-day mendacity that is life and she can focus on events and stories that give a full picture to growing up (white) in Africa.

Fuller weaves her story back and forth between an intimate portrait of her family and the violence surrounding them. The family moves from farm to farm, so it would be easy to describe the land, in its exoticism, as endlessly various and endlessly the same, but Fuller has a talent for difference. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, a story of civil war and a family's unbreakable bond. I found it fascinating to not only read of the hellish conditions, but also how this young girl named Bobo, deals with so many challenges. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review; The Financial Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail.In the morning, when she's just on the pills, she's very sleepy and calm and slow and deliberate, like someone who isn't sure where her body ends and the world starts. 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. Their swimming pools are choked with algae, alive with scorpions, dotted with the small faces of monitor lizards that obscure hanging bodies, four- to six-feet long. The family clearly love Africa - but it certainly wasn't easy for them and they seemed to move between countries very easily.