Cultured Travel Guide Books - Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier |
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 968.94042
EAN: 9780143035015
ISBN: 0143035010
Label: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2005-04-26
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics) |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very interesting!
Comment: I liked this as a follow up to her original! It was very informative of how african soldiers lived etc. I listened to both on audio and was pleasantly surprised at a cold pick I had chosen!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Twist on the Truth
Comment: A well written and fairly well researched book... and an immense disappointment. A married woman, happily undertaking an "adventure" in landmine-ridden Mozambique with a man who is clearly in love with her. Sadly this, together with the fact that yet another unmarried man also falls for her charms, completely detracts from the story. Furthermore, I am a displaced Zimbabwea, and my father and husband both fought on the wrong side of that war. Their memories of that time are somewhat different to Ms Fuller's, and it's very doubtful that a man as tragic and scarred by his internal demons as K would open his heart to this relatively unknown woman. Having read Peter Godwin's excellent "Mukiwa" and "When the Crocodile Eats the Sun" I can honestly say this book falls a distant way behind those two.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lets Not Go to the Dogs Tonight
Comment: This is one of the must amuzing and informative books I have read about Africa and being African. I started to read it one night for an hour before sleep and didn't put it down untill well after dawn. Fuller brings to life a vibrant late twentieth centure Africa. Lets Not Go to the Dogs Tonight blossoms in both style and content. It is brilliant.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Disingeneous writing
Comment: "Scribbling the Cat" feels like an excuse that a bored married woman gave her husband to go have an adventure. Never before have I been so acutely aware of (or speculated on) a writer's ulterior motives in the telling of her story.
It felt as if she was censoring her writing. Was this to protect husband/children? Was this because she was being dishonest with herself? Whatever the reason, I felt as though she was being dishonest with me, the reader.
The story of 'K' is laid bare across the pages of her book in, at times, painful reading. Fuller claims that she undertook this journey with 'K' to confront her own Rhodesian past and tell 'K's story. Yet, at the end, I know as little about Fuller as I did in the beginning. She reveals nothing of herself -- other than the occasional "thin" explanation that to me felt more like rationalization than anything else.
I find the work fundamentally disingenuous, although Fuller is undoubtedly a skillful word smith and creates a compelling narrative.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not my thing
Comment: There is a certain subgenre of literature about the Third World that insists on reminding the reader of the heat, bugs, filth, poverty, and misery on every page, turning the problems of the developing world into a sort of fetish. Scribbling the Cat epitomizes the style. In this book full of vivid images, very little actually happens; the protagonist, "K", is a crazed, violent pseudomystical freak on page ten and a crazed, violent pseudomystical freak on page 250. Two stars not one due to Fuller's strong, vivid prose.
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| Editorial Reviews: |
With the same disarmingly unguarded prose that won her critical acclaim for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller tells of her unusual friendship with “K”—a white African and veteran of the brutal, racially divided Rhodesian War. An engrossing and haunting tale of love, godliness, hate, war, and survival, Scribbling the Cat recounts the journey she makes with K into the lands that hold the scars of their war, from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and into Mozambique. Driven by memories, they venture deeper into the countries’ remote bush, where they encounter other veterans and survivors and confront the demons of K’s past: a violent war marked by racial strife, jungle battles, torture, and the murdering of innocent civilians.
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