Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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Three of the five Fuller children die before the age of two; only the author and her sister Vanessa survive. Their mother struggles with fierce bouts of alcoholism and breakdowns This is a joyously telling memoir that evokes Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club as much as it does Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa.” —New York Daily News This is a gritty, "warts and all" memoir. Fuller's early years were anything but dull. But be warned... Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), a memoir by the Zimbabwean writer Alexandra Fuller, tells the story of Fuller’s childhood in Zimbabwe—then Rhodesia—on a series of struggling farms. Fuller places her personal recollections of lost siblings and her mother’s alcoholism in the context of Zimbabwe’s political upheaval and the situation of white colonists in Southern Africa. The title alludes to a joke by the writer and humorist A. P. Herbert: “Don't let's go to the dogs tonight, for mother will be there.”

And finally, I feel that the author has a wonderful way of relating to her annoying, ever so self-assured mother. I came to understand that mother and I came to admire the author’s ability to accept her mother for who she is. You have to read the books, both books in fact, to understand. I not only learned historical facts, but I also learned on a personal level how one should/could relate to a strong, some times terribly annoying Mom.Mum smiles, but... it's a slipping and damp thing she's doing with her lips which looks as much as if she's lost control of her mouth as anything else." Find sources: "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( November 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Captured wild cattle give "reluctant milk" and even after adding Milo milkshake powder, "nothing can disguise the taste of the reluctant milk". The photos are straight from the family album. You see the kids, the one's that survive, growing up. By the time she has drunk a quarter of a bottle of whisky, we have lost reception from Bush House in London and the radio hisses to itself from under its fringe of bougainvillea. Mum has pulled out her old Scottish records. There are three of them. Three records of men in kilts playing bagpipes. The photographs show them marching blindly

Her prose is fierce, unsentimental, sometimes puzzled, and disconcertingly honest . . . it is Fuller's clear vision, even of the most unpalatable facts, that gives her book its strength. It deserves to find a place alongside Olive Schreiner, Karen Blixen and Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph The story centers on Fuller's parents, unreconstructed white settlers who were stunned to see Rhodesia fall. These are difficult things to say – get the tone wrong and you will offend almost everyone – but Fuller’s gaze is equally astonishing when she directs it at the bodies of the white people around her. Her mother dances after a bath and the towel slips to expose “blood smeared” thighs; her own belly is distended by worms. A visiting missionary starts to squirm with embarrassment on the sofa, “like a dog rubbing worms out of their bum on a rug, or on the furniture, which we call sailing”. By turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring . . . hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling.”— The New Yorker

Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, a story of civil war and a family's unbreakable bond. Her latest book, Leaving Before the Rains Come, was publ Alexandra Fuller has written five books of non-fiction.

Review: Leaving Before the Rains Come, by Alexandra Fuller". The Irish Times . Retrieved 15 August 2019.A German aid worker "is keen on saving the environment, which, until then, I had not noticed needed saving". The author frequently has her mother say to her you can put that in one of your awful books. The mother is the heroine of this book and although I have possibly read most of the other books in this multi book series and some of the events from other books I repeated in this one, I may have enjoyed this one the most of all of them. Other reviewer's have not agreed with my assessment but I believe my familiarity with the author and her story of life in central Africa has grown on me. The quote ‘If we were killed in an ambush or blown up on a mine, we will be wearing clean brookies, our best dresses’ hints at the privilege of white colonialists in Rhodesia: even in death they are above others, wearing symbols of their wealth and status. Additionally the decision to use the more definitive future tense instead of the conditional in this statement emphasises the severity of the danger she faces everyday, and the high risk of death.