Reader's Guide: January 2009

	Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

A classic is born in this tender, intensely moving and even delightful journey through a white African girl's childhood. Born in England and now living in Wyoming, Fuller was conceived and bred on African soil during the Rhodesian civil war (1971-1979), a world where children over five "learn[ed] how to load an FN rifle magazine, strip and clean all the guns in the house, and ultimately, shoot-to-kill."...

(Bill Tipper, from the Publisher)
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is a memoir that brilliantly tells several tales at once. Alexandra Fuller depicts the end of the colonial era in Africa through the experience of her family's hardscrabble farming life during the tumult of civil war in Zimbabwe and the social unrest that followed. Framed within the deadly, beautiful landscape of rural Africa, Fuller produces a sharply drawn, poetically charged record of a childhood and a coming-of-age.

This is a compelling story with themes worthy of our book club recommendation: the author's sometimes harrowing and sometimes comic family life, the complex relationships between European settlers and native Africans, and Fuller's own engaging, funny, and painfully honest voice.

Few books of fiction can boast characters as rich as the colorful, disturbing, and immediately unforgettable figures of Fuller's parents, English settlers in what was in 1972 still called Rhodesia. Fuller's father is a memorable example of the self-reliant and entrepreneurial frontiersman, but it is Fuller's mother, Nicola, who leaps off the page as a fascinating and almost demonic presence, the object of her family's worship and fear. Manic-depressive, alcoholic, dominating, and willful, Nicola also embodies an uncompromising racist ideology that cannot be ignored. As the book unfolds, Fuller portrays her mother's long psychological collapse with an unflinching clarity and reveals the depth of her family's suffering without self-pity.

While Fuller's turbulent family history provides the thread that stitches Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight together, it is the book's broadly woven tapestry of African life—both human and natural—that invites plentiful avenues for conversation. Fuller subtly explores the long-established settler racism, whereby white owners both cared for and exploited the Africans they lived with, and takes care to demonstrate how she partook of it as a child. From within this view, there are only two kinds of Africans—servants and "terrorists," and Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight is partly the story of Fuller's efforts to unlearn this blinkered mind-set. Ultimately, she faces the fact that as a European, Africa is not hers; and yet she gives her heart to it, finally realizing that "Africa owned me."

Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight raises questions about how we think about past injustice, and how we build futures on the sites of old struggles. It offers a fascinating portrait of life in the near-wilderness and asks us to think about what the price of experiencing this inhospitable landscape might be. Finally, Fuller's memoir makes us think about the depths of family ties, the lengths to which people can go to survive and to protect their way of life, and the resilience with which change can be faced. Fuller's African journey contains brutality and tenderness alongside huge failures and small triumphs—and it is not a trip one is eager to see end.

1. Fuller compares the smell of Africa to "black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass." She describes "an explosion of day birds . . . a crashing of wings" and "the sound of heat. The grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. Dogs pant." How effective is the author in drawing the reader into her world with the senses of sound, smell, and taste? Can you find other examples of her ability to evoke a physical and emotional landscape that pulses with life? What else makes her writing style unique?

2. Given their dangerous surroundings in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia and a long streak of what young Bobo describes as "bad, bad luck," why does the Fuller family remain in Africa?

3. Drawing on specific examples, such as Nicola Fuller's desire to "live in a country where white men still ruled" and the Fuller family's dramatic interactions with African squatters, soldiers, classmates, neighbors, and servants, how would you describe the racial tensions and cultural differences portrayed in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, particularly between black Africans and white Africans?

4. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is rich with humorous scenes and dialogue, such as the visit by two missionaries who are chased away by the family's overfriendly dogs, a bevy of ferocious fleas, and the worst tea they have ever tasted. What other examples of comedy can you recall, and what purpose do you think they serve in this serious memoir?

5. Fuller describes the family's move to Burma Valley as landing them "right [in] the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia." Do her youthful impressions give a realistic portrait of the violent conflict?

6. The New York Times Book Review described Nicola as "one of the most memorable characters of African memoir." What makes the author's portrait of her mother so vivid? How would you describe Bobo's father?

7. Define the complex relationship between Bobo and Vanessa. How do the two sisters differ in the ways that they relate to their parents?

8. Animals are ever present in the book. How do the Fullers view their domesticated animals, as compared to the wild creatures that populate their world?

9. Of five children born to Nicola Fuller, only two survive. "All people know that in one way or the other the dead must be laid to rest properly," Alexandra Fuller writes. Discuss how her family deals with the devastating loss of Adrian, Olivia, and Richard. Are they successful in laying their ghosts to rest?

10. According to Bobo, "Some Africans believe that if your baby dies, you must bury it far away from your house, with proper magic and incantations and gifts for the gods, so that the baby does not come back." Later, at Devuli Ranch, soon after the narrator and her sister have horrified Thompson, the cook, by disturbing an old gravesite, Bobo's father announces that he is going fishing: "If the fishing is good, we'll stay here and make a go of it. If the fishing is bad, we'll leave." What role does superstition play in this book? Look for examples in the behavior and beliefs of both black and white Africans.

11. Consider Fuller's interactions with black Africans, including her nanny in Rhodesia and the children she plays "boss and boys" with, as well as with Cephas the tracker and, later, the first black African to invite her into his home. Over the course of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, how does the narrator change and grow?

12. By the end of the narrative, how do you think the author feels about Africa? Has the book changed your own perceptions about this part of the world?