Book Review: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This hauntingly beautiful and often humorous memoir about the author's Rhodesian childhood perfectly embodies that age-old mantra of our writing teachers, show, don't tell! Fuller's prose "shows" us a clear, unsentimental picture of Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. It shows us everything: the striking beauty of the terrain, the landmines, the poverty, the violence, the vestiges of colonial life. She shows us the eccentricities of her parents, farmers whose combination of ethnocentrism and heartfelt humanitarianism are sure to befuddle we 21st century American readers with our predilection for putting people into distinct categories. She shows us this with stunning, evocative prose. And she doesn't tell us things. She doesn't politicize in either direction. She doesn't allow her narrative to be perforated with a million post-colonial caveats, admonitions and qualifications. She tells us neither that her parents were racist nor that they were saints. She doesn't editorialize about the legitimacy of her parents' love for Africa, or the fact that they considered it their rightful home. She simply shows us what her life was like in a way that makes a girl from a suburb of Los Angeles feel as though she were really there.

The fact that Alexandra Fuller chooses "showing" over "telling" has led some readers to call this book "Anti-African" and others to call it "detached." Readers will take from it what they will, but I found it to be neither of these things. I found a memoir that renders a unique life in a unique time and place, with pathos, humor and eloquence.



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