Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier Paperback – Illustrated, April 26, 2005

This is a very well-crafted book from the point of view of a young woman growing up in Rhodesia with her parents and sister. This book chronicles her friendship and travels with a somewhat rebellious and broken-down African soldier, the unnamed K, as they journey through his life and her insight. It touches her life in a very spiritual and emotionally informed way. It is not mushy emotional but insightful in a way that becomes a mirror for the reader as is all of her work. It is a terrific read as are all of her books and is sprinkled with African colloquial slang. Don't worry, a small lexicon in the back defines her terms. (And don't worry, what it means to "scribble the cat" is only one interesting turn of the phrase that will delight the reader. She is a very talented writer, very talented. She is a word-crafter and I would recommend this to anyone who is an avid reader of anything. Book clubs should pick this or ANY of her books!

I read Ms. Fuller's first book strictly by accident. I thought Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight would have been a political view of the struggle in Rhodesia between the white settlers and the indigenous people. It wasn't, however, and while at first I was disappointed as I kept reading I found a brilliantly told tale of a family that lived in Rhodesia that is very similar to many families I know all over America.Scribbling the Cat is another Fuller memoir set in Africa, and this one is even more personal. The first book tells the story of the Fuller family, and as the mother is the focus of the family the story is truly a mother daughter tale. This book is a story about who Alexandra Fuller became, not how she grew up, and I love it.Just as in the first book, this is a story that is distinctly rooted in Africa, but if you change some of the names and some of the locations, it truly has played out in America as well. Fuller meets a former Rhodesian soldier, warrior more like it, and is awestruck by his lifestyle. He is now a gentleman farmer living in an area that doesn't have many white gentleman farmers, especially ones who in the past were killing their African gentleman farmer counterparts.Fuller does a great job of bringing the reader along on the journey. Her writing style reminds me in a way of Hemingway. Hemingway had a way of making me feel the heat in Key Largo, feeling the strength of the fish in Old Man. Fuller really made me feel the mud on the trail to the farm, the smell of the fruit bearing trees she passes, the heat from the African sun, and most important I felt the affection that the old soldier began to feel for Ms. Fuller, and the confusion Ms. Fuller felt for him.All in all a great book by a great writer. Alexandra Fuller is one of the truly great writers alive today and while she lives in America her heart still resides in the Africa of her childhood. She seems keenly aware of the problems the white Rhodesians inflicted upon their native residents. I definitely feel her sense of, I hate to say it because it is far more complex, but guilt for what happened to the Africans subject to white Rhodesian rule. Her escort, the former Rhodesian soldier, was part of the problem, a very bloody part of the problem, and she truly struggles to get past the things he did. She doesn't make him a villain, but she doesn't deify him either.I can also feel that she would take issue with my use of African in that last paragraph. When I say Rhodesian I am thinking of them as white European settlers. In Ms. Fuller's case, however, she is just as African as any black African subject to Rhodesian rule. Reading between the lines Ms. Fuller is in many ways a victim of the same colonialism many black Africans suffered from. She was white, but hardly wealthy.Throughout this journey I truly had a sense that I am seeing Africa through the eyes of an African, something that Ms. Fuller can't shake, because it is who she is. One great thing I got from this book was fair notice that my simple categorization of the problem, this is white, this is black, this is African, this is European, the European whites were oppressive, the Africans are the victims, speaks to my ignorance of the reality many people are living in these former colonial areas that can't be categorized. Good people had to do bad things to become free, good people did bad things to serve a belief they later realized was wrong.

Scribbling The Cat falls right in line with all of Alexandra Fuller's "African" books. She writes about what she has intimate knowledge of, and she is able to put her experiences down on paper in a very captivating writing style. Don't hesitate to acquire Scribbling The Cat, you'll enjoy your read.

Scribbling the Cat is a strange and unsettling book. Like Fuller's two other Rhodesian memoirs, Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, it's hauntingly evocative and elegantly written. Once more, I was effortlessly transported to Southern Africa, "a land of almost breath-taking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought" (143). But unlike the other two Rhodesian memoirs, Scribbling the Cat is elusive and dark and ultimately it loses its momentum. Fuller's charming sense of humor and endearing optimism are largely absent here, replaced, instead, by meandering reflections and a sense of foreboding that is never truly resolved.When reading fiction, I normally try very hard to separate my feelings about the author from my attitudes about the book. With memoir, however, that's a little bit harder to do, because the author is selling not just her story, but also herself, to some extent - her values, impressions and presuppositions. And while I had started to develop a sort of benign "girl crush" on Fuller after reading her two other memoirs, this one left me questioning her character a little bit, and the book as a whole.Instead of focusing on her childhood and family life growing up in Rhodesia, this memoir centers on Fuller's friendship and travels with a man whom she calls "K," an ex-soldier who fought on the losing side of the Rhodesian war. She meets "K" while visiting her parents' fish and banana farm in Zambia, and despite her father's warnings to steer clear of him, Fuller, who seems to be suffering from a kind of spiritual malaise, quickly develops a kindred connection with the man as they travel together alone, often in very intimate settings, through Zimbabwe and Mozambique. "K" is very much reminiscent of Stanley Kowalski , a volatile, choleric soul trapped in a shell of hyper masculinity. It's clear throughout the memoir that Fuller finds herself both repulsed by and strangely attracted to "K", which is problematic, since she is married with two children. Throughout the book, Fuller, who is so transparent in her other memoirs, remains silent on the appropriateness of this arrangement.Fuller probably wouldn't have been able to write this book had "K" not developed romantic feelings for her shortly after their first meeting. And more than a few readers, myself probably included, seem to think that Fuller exploits "K's" feelings order to get the goods---that is, the material she needs to write a compelling story. She's also on a kind of spiritual journey herself, and she thinks that if she can just figure out "K", then she might be able to make sense of her family's own involvement in the war. She expresses her desire to "label ["K"] and write him into coherence," and, by extension, herself. But "K" is a complex person, a professing "born again" Christian who is tormented by the ghosts of his past and driven by an unpredictable brew of sincere faith, erratic superstition, debilitating guilt and blind rage. By the end of both her literal and metaphorical journeys, we know very little about "K," and very little about Fuller and only a little bit more about Africa. Her goal - "to patch together enough words to make sense of [their] lives" (239) - is never realized, and only two major insights are communicated: that war indiscriminately breaks people's bodies and souls and that Fuller indiscriminately breaks men's hearts. The first insight I already suspected before reading this book and the second one I was sad to discover.