Review by New York Times Review
"I'M going to write an Awful Book and this time it really will be about you," Alexandra Fuller promises when her mother complains over a favorite walking stick's being broken in a battle with a poisonous snake. Another Awful Book, as far as her mother is concerned. Fuller had not yet been forgiven for publishing the first one in 2001, the intoxicating "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight." Her family may well have felt betrayed by the ruthlessly cleareyed daughter's impression of a dangerous, unruly childhood of minefields and malaria, on a succession of impoverished tobacco and cattle farms in war-torn Kenya, Rhodesia, Botswana, Malawi and Zambia in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Fuller's parents are courageous, hardworking and colorfully eccentric. They are also stubbornly racist and unremittingly alcoholic; her mother suffers from brutal swings of mania and depression; her father lapses into silence. Three siblings die in infancy. If you have ever wondered what it takes to survive as a settler of inhospitable territory, meet Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she often introduces herself. She may have been a child's nightmare - a terrifying, seductive, cruel and abandoning enchantress - but she is a writer's dream. And she knows it. Which must make it easier to write another Awfully Fabulous Book. Fuller has returned to the Africa of war, terror, death and her parents in her second memoir, "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness." This time, though, she returns as an adult, with the empathy of a more mature writer. She is also the mother of children old enough to remember things. She returns with a yearning to connect with her own inaccessible mother whose disconnectedness seems only to have knifed deeper into her daughter's soul over the years. If "Dogs" was a love story about Africa, "Cocktail Hour" is a love story - with subtle, steady-handed recrimination but without the attendant rancor - about her mother, "the broken, splendid, fierce mother I have." Alexandra Fuller describes herself as a "reasonably pliable witness" to her mother's dramatic life. About her first book, she says, "I had felt more than a little encouraged to write it - directed, even - by Nicola Fuller of Central Africa herself." Well, children are like blotting paper; the trouble is you never know what's going to soak in, or where the stain will spread. "Dogs" was written in the throes of remembering; "Cocktail Hour" recaptures the past through reporting. Fuller reunites with her parents for a holiday in South Africa, during which she nudges them through their histories, listening as "the doves in the tree above our heads are wing clattering into their night's sleep." She does not censor the sanguine, cracked perspective of the colonialist. When her mother's father shoots a Kikuyu, he is sentenced to one day in jail. "There was an outcry from the community. 'My father was the starter at the races. ... He couldn't possibly spend the day in jail. He was the only one who knew how to do the starter flags.'" Fuller visits Kenya - but Nicola distances herself from the highborn, decadent Happy Valley set. She remembers Inky Porter, an English aristocrat who hired Nicola's mother as a baby sitter, handing over a newborn infant so she could join a hunt in Uganda. The baby was born "pickled in gin and withdrawing from cocaine." It "died in agony ... in my mother's arms." Nicola is impatient with the romantic mystique of Kenya: "No one talks about the poor dead baby." Alexandra returns to the Burma Valley in Zimbabwe, looking for traces of her family: "Robandi is the geography of my nightmares. ... If I peel back the corner of memories of that place, what races in is too big for any of me to feel at one sitting - no mere piece of land can be responsible for that." Three of her siblings died in what became Zimbabwe, one a toddler who had been left in the distracted care of 8-year-old Alexandra and a neighbor. "Cocktail Hour" is disturbing in places, funny in others. It pulses with life and love. Nicola's voice threatens to drown out everyone else's, but fortunately she's hilarious, creative, opinionated, ribald and tragic. She seems to have Lived Life in Capital Letters - and at first, this contaminates Fuller's writing. Early chapters are peppered with references to the Awful Book, which give way, for example, to "Collect Aborigines or Begin a Breed of Dogs." I'm a reader with a High Tolerance for Capital Experiences, but these seemed gratuitous, Nancy Mitford wannabes. But Fuller quickly muffles this tic. When she is in the company of her quiet, reserved, stalwart father, her writing becomes elegiac. "Dad found comfort in the emptiness: the lonely ribs of a long, gravel road, a makeshift bed under wild stars in an insect-sung night." Her mother gave her material, but her father allowed her to find her voice. Nicola Fuller dragged her belongings from one farm to another; with every move a few more possessions were cast off, until just about the only thing to have survived was a set of orange Le Creuset pots, their bottoms blackened. Everything else was "lost, stolen, broken, died, left behind," she says. Much the same could be said of her life. But it is resilience that shines through: a tender, loving, attentive marriage miraculously survives poverty and calamity. Two daughters remain connected, each in her own way. And the family's shared love of Africa endures. After a lifetime of loss and failure, Nicola and Tim, in their 50s, decide to try one last time to own land in Africa. "Land is Mum's love affair and it is Dad's religion." They build a farm on the banks of the Zambezi River in Zambia and successfully raise bananas and fish. Nicola chooses a site for their new home under a large Tree of Forgetfulness. "They say ancestors stay inside it," their neighbor explains. "If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong. . . . All your troubles and arguments will be resolved." I suppose cocktail hours have a way of resolving things. Writers turn to memoir for all kinds of good (and bad) reasons - but never to forget. We compulsively revisit an episode that shattered a life, or pick at a shard of memory that demands to be prized out of the bedrock of our souls. We work memory over, perhaps hoping, subconsciously, that things will turn out differently - or more realistically, that we will discover a key that unlocks a memory's mysterious urgency. That drive to make sense, to find a deeper meaning in the shallows of daily life, to turn splintered chaos into a coherent story, makes a memoir worth reading. And "Cocktail Hour" hits the mark. It may be regarded as a prequel, or a sequel, to "Dogs." It hardly matters. The two memoirs form a fascinating diptych of mirrors, one the reflection of a child's mind, the other of an adult's. Images bounce and refract over the years; the reader catches a glimpse of the adult in the child, and the child in the adult. Taken together, as they ought to be, the books transport us to a grand landscape of love, loss, longing and reconciliation. Fuller's two memoirs form a diptych of mirrors, one the reflection of a child's mind, the other of an adult's. Dominique Browning's memoir, "Slow Love," is being published in paperback this month; she writes regularly at the blog Slow Love Life.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 4, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her fourth memoir, Fuller revisits her vibrant, spirited parents, first introduced in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), which her mother referred to as tha. awful book. While that so-calle. awful boo. focused on Fuller's memories of growing up in Rhodesia during that country's civil war, this one focuses solely on her parents: their youth, their meeting, and their struggles to find a home on the continent they are both so passionate about. Fuller's mother, Nicola, the child of Scottish parents, grew up in Kenya, while her father, Tim, had an austere childhood in London. Tim wandered the world before landing in Kenya and meeting Nicola. Readers will recall the hardships the couple faced from Fuller's first memoir: the deaths of three of their five children and the loss of their home in Rhodesia. 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.--Huntley, Kristin. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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, determined to stake a life on their farm despite the raging African civil war around them. Fuller's mother is the central figure, Nicola Fuller of Central, as she is known, born "one million percent Highland Scottish"; she grew up mostly in Kenya in the 1950s, was schooled harshly by the nuns in Eldoret, learned to ride horses masterfully, and married a dashing Englishman before settling down on their own farm, first in Kenya, then Rhodesia, where the author (known as Bobo) and her elder sister, Vanessa, were born in the late 1960s. The outbreak of civil war in the mid-1970s resolved the family to dig in deeper on their farm in Robandi, rather than flee, to order to preserve a life of colonial privilege and engrained racism that was progressively vanishing. While the girls dispersed as grownups (the author lives in Wyoming with her American husband), the parents managed to secure a fish and banana farm in the middle of the Zambezi valley in Zambia, and under a legendary Tree of Forgetfulness (where ancestors are supposed to reside and help resolve trouble) they ruminate with their visitors over the long-gone days, full of death and loss, the ravages of war, and a determination to carry on. Fuller achieves another beautifully wrought memoir. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Fuller's previous well-received memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood dealt with her time growing up amid the harsh realities of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during civil war in the 1970s. In her new memoir, billed as a combination of prequel and sequel, she focuses on her mother, Nicola Fuller, whose adventurous spirit, droll humor, and abiding love for Africa were challenged by the tragic deaths of three of her young children and her subsequent mental breakdown. Fuller evocatively depicts her mother's Kenya childhood, marriage to Tim Fuller, and the ensuing chaos and joys of raising a family and eking out a precarious living amid the wild and inspiring African landscape. Her eloquent depiction of her mother's darker sides, including racism, alcoholism, and mental illness, reveals a fascinating, flawed, and funny woman whose story illuminates the contradictions and extremes of Africa -itself. -VERDICT Unsparing, well written, and spiced with many compelling anecdotes, this vivid tale of a one-of-a-kind matriarch and her family's fortitude through adversity and absurdity will be relished by memoir fans and recreational readers interested in Africa. Such readers may also enjoy Isak Dinesen's classic Out of Africa or Barbara Kingsolver's dark novel The Poisonwood Bible. [See Prepub Alert, 1/31/11.]-Ingrid Levin, Salve Regina Univ. Lib., Newport, RI (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Revisiting her family story first introduced in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), Fuller (The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, 2008, etc.) employs her mother's exceptional life as a pivot point for chronicling her parent's perseverance overcoming personal tragedies and the political chaos of mid-20th-century Africa.The golden-hued life of white settlers in Kenya, ensured by the trappings of the British empire, was already a mirage by the mid 1960s when Fuller's parents married. In 1964, the Republic of Kenya was born, ending white rule. For several years, the young couple lived idyllic lives, but the political climate was deteriorating. Like many "jittery settlers" Fuller's grandparents sold their farm and returned to Britain, never to return to Africa. Fuller's mother was devastated, and she and the author's father remained but "receded further and further south as African countries in the north gained their independence." The family resettled into a new home in Rhodesia, but a family tragedy soon found them, precipitating the family's relocation to England, where the author was born. The dreary, rain-soaked island held little appeal for the family; Fuller's mother recalls, "We longed for the warmth and freedom, the real open spaces, the wild animals, the sky at night." After returning to Africa and borrowing money for a farm in Rhodesia, the family found themselves engulfed by civil war. After another devastating family loss catapulted Fuller's mother into a cascade of breakdowns, their luck turned when the Zambian government issued them a 99-year lease on a farm. During a 2010 visit, Fuller's parents were happy and at peace, their farm "a miracle of productivity, order and routine."Gracefully recounted using family recollections and photos, the author plumbs the narrative with a humane and clear-eyed gazea lush story, largely lived within a remarkable place and time.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
