Now in paperback, the author of "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" travels into a modern-day "Heart of Darkness."

Reviews

With Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller gave us a lacerating account of growing up in Africa at a time when black rule was replacing white rule. Here she proves that though she now lives in Wyoming, she can never really escape Africa. During a trip home to visit her parents, Fuller meets the mysterious K, a battle-scarred survivor of Rhodesia's civil war, who remains haunted by his experiences and lives alone after the departure of several wives and the death of a child. He still speaks contemptuously of black Africans but is a born-again Christian. To try to understand him-and hence Africa itself-Fuller agrees to travel with him to the area where he served as a soldier. This really is a trip into the heart of darkness, evocatively rendered in Fuller's astonishing prose. Along the way, the reader is caught wondering just what this woman thinks she's doing and whether the travelog is so artfully rendered as to be entirely real. (Will Fuller ever turn to fiction? One hopes so.) But in the end, this is a beautiful and powerfully moving account that gives us some insight into the tragedy of Africa today. If curiosity scribbled (that is, killed) the cat, then let yourself be scribbled. Highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Memoirist Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) describes this book, about her friendship with a Rhodesian war veteran, as "a slither of a slither of a much greater story." This disclaimer doesn't excuse the book's thinness, as it traces Fuller's journey with the white ex-soldier, K, from his farm in Zambia through Zimbabwe and into Mozambique, to the battlefields of more than two decades ago. Fuller evokes place and character with the vivid prose that distinguished her unflinching memoir of growing up in Africa, but here she handles subject matter that warrants more than artful word painting and soul-searching. Writing about war its scarred participants, victims and territory Fuller skimps on the history and politics that have shaped her and her subjects. Her personal enmeshment with K is the story's core. She's enamored of his physical beauty and power, and transfixed by his contradictions: K's capacity for both violence and emotional vulnerability, his anger and generosity, the blood on his hands and the faith he relies on (he's a born-again Christian) to cope with his demons. Fuller becomes K's confessor, and the journey turns into a kind of penance for her complicity, as a white girl in the 1970s, in a war of white supremacy. When K recounts how he tortured an African girl, Fuller swallows nausea and thinks, "I am every bit that woman's murderer." Fuller and K embark on their road trip ostensibly for the shell-shocked man to get beyond his "spooks" and for Fuller to write about it, but this motivation makes for a rather static journey. Photos. (On sale May 10) Forecast: Don't Let's Go received rave reviews, and readers of that book will probably want to read this new one. A 10-city author tour, national review coverage and national media attention will drive interest. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

"Searing, at times intoxicating prose... striking, intimately revealing..." --The Washington Post



"Scribbling the Cat defies easy definition . . . [a] wild-hearted beauty of a book." --O, The Oprah Magazine



"[Scribbling the Cat] is no more a simple profile of an ex-soldier than Fuller's first book, the acclaimed bestseller Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, was merely a memoir of growing up.... The story catches fire." --Newsweek