WTF Lion

Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller (Penguin Books, 2004)

I bought this book when I came across it cheap. I had heard good things about Fuller's earlier Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and was taken with the excerpt from this work that had appeared in the New Yorker (natch). Then it sat around for years, waiting for me. And I don't know why the time was now, but it was. And let me tell you, this book blew me away.

Fuller grew up in what was Rhodesia, and then Zambia. But in this book she is in the US, married, with two small children. Except she's back at her parents' home in Zambia. And she meets this man, who she calls K, a veteran of the wars in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He has demons, and she ends up with what I can only describe as severe cognitive dissonance upon her return to Wyoming. So when she ends up back in Africa a year later, and sees him again, somehow she hatches a plan that they will travel back into Zimbabwe and Mozambique, that through this he may exorcise the past, and she will understand it, understand this war that was the backdrop for her childhood.

But there is so much more going on here. I can't even describe it. I felt like I fell down the rabbit hole as I was reading. But I also felt intensely present, thanks to the minute and vivid detail. And I kept trying to work my way through the silences to understand the relationship between this man and this woman. She uses him, in this way that writers use people, but I wonder if she is using him less - or differently - than she imagines. There's just too much there.

And since I can't manage to coherently explain my reaction to these larger themes, I'll just point out of few of the other places, where Fuller's careful and cutting description shines through.

• During a drought in the region, that somehow skirted the little area near her parents': "in the whole of central and southern Africa they [the news teams] couldn't find people more conveniently desperate--by which I mean desperate and close to both an international airport and a five-star hotel"
• "The engine of Dad's boat, in common with almost everything mechanical on the fish farm, had quirks of temperament that required an intimate knowledge of the psychology of machines to operate."
• A bullfrog, given to Fuller's mother as food but freed by her when she can't bring herself to actually cook him, "leaped under the firewood pile and glared at us with a mixture of alarm and disdain for the next several days."
• And the frog is nothing compared to the animal that prompted the title of this post, which is the actual note I made while reading: K knows a guy who knows a guy - another war veteran, and an important character in this story - who has a "pet" lion. Mambo launches himself at Fuller, only to be stymied time and again by K, who goes all Cesar Milan on him. Mambo's efforts to get at her, which seem like something out of a cartoon (like Lucifer and the mice in Cinderella) continue intermittently for the next 50 pages. And then there is a drunken fight between two men, after which "the lion trotted out of the shadows and started rubbing against their legs, purring resoundingly." To which, I continue to maintain, WTF. The lion is the 160 lb. feline representation of how utterly incomprehensible this world is to a person coming from my background.

At multiple occasions, and more frequently as the trip and the book hurry to a close, Fuller stops to ponder the futility of her mission to understand K, and the war, their own complicity, and how it scarred them all. The trip brought them no closer to anything like healing, and I am unsure of whether it brought acceptance.

What I do know is this: the blurb on the back cover describes K as "strangely charismatic" and I can think of no better term, for him and for the book. It was troubling, terrifying, beautiful, and utterly captivating.