Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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I envy her when I should probably not -- her life has clearly not been easy, but it has been rich with experiences.

Being white is a kind of construct, the continent is experienced by Fuller in a way that is overwhelmingly physical, you might even say – given the worms – visceral. There was so little introspection, so little emotional reaction to anything, and the end of the book was so rushed, that at the end I was disappointed. Everything, the beautiful and the terrible, is described with the intensity felt for something that could be lost at any moment. You wouldn't think a five-year-old's mysterious rash would become an instantly awkward incident of politics and race relations. It was a unique perspective that at times took me far out of my comfort zone, and made me consider how varied individuals’ viewpoints and experiences can be, even when growing up at roughly the same time.Afterwards, "Mum and Dad's joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain. It is so hot outside that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire. 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. The children are sexually assaulted by a neighbour, and the response is the same: “Don’t exaggerate.

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. Her mother dances after a bath and the towel slips to expose “blood smeared” thighs; her own belly is distended by worms. Given the surface-level dissonance of a white family claiming an African identity, Fuller works hard to demonstrate how their roots, their loyalty, even their identities are all inexorably bound to the earth. It is a true story of a white girl growing up in Africa during the civil war, and it smacks of colonialism and racism, both of which I dislike.At the centre of Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible. 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.