Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 FULLER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 921 FULLER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | 921 FULLER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The New York Times Bestseller from the author of Travel Light, Move Fast
"One of the gutsiest memoirs I've ever read. And the writing--oh my god the writing ."-- Entertainment Weekly
A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller's own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.
Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller's delicate balance--between American pragmatism and African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox marriage--irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual courtship in Zambia--elephant attacks on the first date, sick with malaria on the wedding day--Fuller struggles to understand her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes. Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is something that was always there: the brash and uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his daughter that "the problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller's father--"Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode" as he first introduced himself to his future wife--was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even after fighting harder and losing more than most men could bear.
Leaving Before the Rains Come showcases Fuller at the peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother. Fuller reveals how, after spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to show up and save her, she discovered that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves.
An unforgettable book, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and rueful joy only to be found in Fuller's Africa.
Author Notes
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). At the end of that country's civil war, the family moved to Malawi and later Zambia. Fuller received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada after which she returned to Zambia where she worked with a safari company. In 1993, Fuller and her husband settled near Livingstone on the banks of the Zambezi River. In 1994, she left Africa and moved to Wyoming, USA In 2011, her book Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness made Publisher's Weekly Best seller list. Fuller's title, Leaving Before the Rains Come, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thinking back to 1994, when the African-raised Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness), her American husband, and their infant daughter left their cottage in Zimbabwe for a life in the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming, she writes, "Our marriage wasn't going to be about nearly dying, and violent beauty, and unpredictability... sensible decisions, college funds, mortgages, and car payments." In her newest memoir, Fuller insightfully explores the contrasts between the different landscapes and their corresponding mind-sets, as well as between the safe investment she intended with her marriage and the messy, isolating reality of where the relationship ended. As always, when Fuller describes the African farms of her childhood, her prose vibrates with life and death and dry British sensibility. Equally sharp are her observations about American life and its all-consuming pursuit of convenience and comfort. However, this book also attempts to tackle territory for more familiar to her Western audience-a sad, drawn-out divorce complicated by three adored children and piles of debt. Understandably, the utter banality of the day-to-day proves more difficult for Fuller to enliven with her signature punch. Nonetheless, the rich narration of Fuller's upbringing, sensibility, and loneliness make clear that she remains one of the most gifted and important memoirists of our time. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fuller (Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness, 2011) has elevated the memoir to new levels in her books about her and her family's life in Africa. In her latest, she chronicles a painful time: the collapse of her marriage to the man she wed at age 22. Raised in Zimbabwe and Zambia in the tumultuous 1970s and '80s, Fuller believed she'd found the man who could take on not only her but her family as well when she met Charlie Ross, a sturdy, bearded Wyoming native turned river guide. The pair wed after a year together and started their lives in Africa before moving to Wyoming, where Charlie got a job in real estate and Fuller penned numerous novels and worked odd jobs while raising the couple's three children. But as the years went on, the gap between them widened, and Fuller wrestled with the magnitude of what it meant to separate, then end their marriage. Powerful, raw, and painful, Fuller's writing is so immediate, so vivid that whether she's describing the beauty of Zambia or the harrowing hours following a devastating accident, she leaves the reader breathless. Another not-to-be-missed entry from the gifted Fuller.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A MEMOIR OFTEN takes one of two basic forms: In the first, the writer has an extraordinary story to tell; in the second, she has the ability to tell the common story in an extraordinary way. Sometimes - Mary McCarthy's "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood" is an example, Paula Fox's "Borrowed Finery" another - the two are conflated in events on whose extremity the artistic mind succeeds in imposing literary form. I once heard the writer Aharon Appelfeld, asked why he had underplayed the savagery of his Holocaust childhood in one of his books, give the answer that extremity, whether imaginary or real, is harmful to art. What he perhaps meant was that the artist's aim is to represent truth, and that certain experiences - those that infringe or violate the common sense of reality - can never be made to seem true. Joan Didion dealt interestingly with this problem in "The Year of Magical Thinking," making the surreality of her husband's death at the dinner table a space the reader could philosophically inhabit. And likewise Alexandra Fuller, writing about her often tragically idiosyncratic African childhood in "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," brilliantly succeeded in retaining a child's astonished objectivity at the unfolding of bizarre events. "Leaving Before the Rains Come" is Fuller's account of the collapse of her marriage; yet the memoir of divorce is not quite categorizable in any of these terms. Divorce is both ordinary and extreme. For many people it represents their most intense experience of unreality, yet it occurs at the most intimately humdrum level of life. Moreover, divorce is a kind of anti-story: It is the spectacle of narrative breaking down, both personally and publicly. Narrative works by agreement, and the whole point about divorce is that it represents the end of agreement. In divorce the story of life is deemed unfit to continue because the participants cannot agree on a common truth. The truth has to be broken in two; there now have to be two truths, two stories, two versions. The end of marriage is in a sense the end of universality and the beginning of point of view. Onlookers are often forced to take sides, for the reason that it is impossible to believe in two stories at once. And thus a problem arises, which is that before we've even begun to read the memoir of divorce we are convinced that what we are reading is only half the truth. We ourselves are primed to "take sides," to make personal again what the writer is trying to expunge into objectivity. The newly divorced require a sympathetic listener; in that state of vulnerability, they go where the personal bias toward them is strongest, to people who won't challenge their "version." For the writer this requirement would be fatal, as would the notion that others are entitled to tell their "side of the story," despite the fact that those others are not usually writers. By the time the reader has got to the bottom of the first page the defenses of literary form and of authorial privilege have already been hopelessly breached. Alexandra Fuller is sensitive to these pitfalls, while being unable to avoid at least some of them. She quotes Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." She describes with admirable accuracy how this coming to consciousness entails the breaking of pre-existing structures: "In the end, at least in this end, the world beyond me and the world that was inside me could no longer exist in the same place and I broke And yet at the same time, I felt I was in the process of becoming two people - the person I had been, and the person I was becoming." In fact Fuller's "story" of divorce - unlike her story of childhood - is ordinary enough: She and her American husband, after three children, two decades of marriage, and a long, grinding process of decline, cease to live together. "I chose to believe in the possibility of a predictable, chartable future," she writes, "and I had picked a life that I imagined would have certainties, safety nets and assurances. "What I did not know then is that the assurances I needed couldn't be had. I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard." Jung's understanding of the often-destructive crisis of midlife as something that arises from an inability to believe any longer in the "reality" bequeathed by formative experience, and especially by one's parents, underpins Fuller's narrative of divorce in much the same way it does many people's. The difference lies in the extraordinariness of her childhood reality, which Fuller can anatomize superbly while at the same time failing to get out entirely from under it. Instead of reconciling herself to the ordinariness of her divorce narrative, she returns, still magnetized, to the source of extremity: her parents, and the Africa for which, from her first-world middle-class adult existence, she continues to feel a racked and passionate ambivalence. "My parents pitied me the fact that - at least as far as they could tell - all my dramas had to be self-inflicted," she recalls. "'The problem with most people,' Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, 'is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.'" Much of "Leaving Before the Rains Come" concerns itself with the familial histories of both Fuller and her husband (whose background, amazingly, almost equals Fuller's in its extraordinariness). Consequently, the book is longer and more diverting than in a sense it ought to be, while at the same time the incompatibility of these two narratives - the as it were pre-Jungian "belief" narrative and the broken, searching narrative of personal crisis - creates a sense of uneasiness at its core: "Once, elbow deep in bubbles at the children's bath time, I suddenly found myself praying in a kind of panic that nothing would ever change. 'It never has to get better than this,' I remember thinking. 'We can do this forever. Just like this.' But the mere fact of my thinking it was a kind of acknowledgment that this couldn't last, neither the equitable moment of our marriage nor the shaky American dream in which it had been conceived. Because seen in a certain light, . . . that promising dream has a depressing, thrill-ride quality about it, hurdy-gurdy with brightness, loud and distracting." Such moments of honesty are the more heart-rending for the feeling that one is watching the author still imprisoned in the sources of her pain: "I believed in what I was doing I just no longer believed in the person who was doing it." "For the first time," Fuller writes, "I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it." This is the unattained goal of many a woman who has fought her way clear of a conventional female destiny, only to find that she is too depleted to become that which she glimpsed from within the now-broken prison of the old life. Fuller is far from depleted: This book perhaps marks the beginning of her journey toward an unassailable possession of mind, and toward a new kind of freedom. 'I believed in what I was doing. . . . I just no longer believed in the person who was doing it.' RACHEL CUSK'S latest novel, "Outline," has just been published.
Guardian Review
Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), a ferociously unsentimental account of her childhood as the offspring of white settlers in 1970s Rhodesia, was followed in 2011 by Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, her equally candid memoir about her hard-drinking, dysfunctional parents (Fuller's mother memorably features in the first book as the "Leaning Tower of Pissed"). Dogs ends with a glimpse of Fuller, aged 22 - the bruised survivor of a quixotic family and a terrifying civil war - on the day of her wedding to an American called Charlie Ross. The bride is feverish with malaria. The bride's mother leads the wedding party around the farm on extended drunken picnics. The bride's father ends the day by setting himself on fire, and is extinguished with a bottle of champagne by an alarmed guest. "I couldn't," Fuller concludes, "be more thoroughly married." Sadly, it turns out that this was wishful thinking. Leaving Before the Rains Come picks up where Dogs left off, following Fuller and her unsuspecting new husband into a rocky 20-year union and out the other side. The savage wit that gave her earlier memoirs their bite slices through the conventional pieties of family relationships here, too. Declaring that she isn't impressed by her parents' "suicide mission of a deliberately disordered life", Fuller chooses Charlie - a seemingly unflappable safari tour operator and white-water rafter - because he is "someone who wasn't a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous". Her hope is that she and Charlie will find safety in each other, but in spite of their sincerity and idealism, the problems of culture and belonging that they face prove insurmountable. The two rent a charmless house outside Lusaka in Zambia, where Charlie tries to build up his safari business, and Fuller, feeling under pressure to play the capable white homesteader, discovers that she is unable to manage her household at all. These scenes are bleakly comic. There is a hostile cook "with the creeping aspect of a spy" who scrubs the floors outside their bedroom at midnight; a stoned gardener who appropriates the vegetable patch to grow his marijuana crop; a bored groom to whom Fuller gives "death-defying" driving lessons. "I could not prevent the staff from fighting with each other and brazenly stealing from us, and then spreading blame all around," she confesses. "I had no control over when anyone came to work, or when, if ever, they left." Fuller's recollection of this domestic shambles is saved from condescension by her own chastening sense of inadequacy, and her awareness that, much as she loves Africa, her claim to belong to it can only ever be provisional. But if she is not African, then what is she? During an outbreak of cholera she pays compulsive visits to a makeshift downtown clinic, appalled by the "invisible membrane" between its "dank, dying world" and the sterile bunker she inhabits with Charlie. Even more disturbing is her awareness that the suffering on display in the slum hospital resonates with her in a way that living with her orderly, temperate husband does not. The truth, as Fuller acknowledges, is that her tumultuous childhood has left her with an affinity for mayhem and trauma. Yet the differences between husband and wife, despite their both being of European descent, are also partly anthropological: [Charlie] viewed me as a wild version of himself, a westerner in the raw. But now that he had married me, and I was out of my natural habitat, my plumage was less shiny, my skills less useful, my constant noise less charming. Instead of looking like a survivor of a tough and wondrous life, I looked like a damaged survivor of sordid, violent and undisciplined excess. Fuller's caustic probing of the meaning of culture - and the micro-culture of the family - is one of the book's great strengths. "In the west," she comments wryly, "it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy" - and soon her fatalism and pervasive sense of dread are brought into a head-on collision with American values. After Fuller nearly dies from malaria following the birth of their first child, she and Charlie relocate to his native Wyoming: It had been decided then: our marriage wasn't going to be about nearly dying, and violent beauty, and unpredictability. Our union was going to be about sticking it out, sensible decisions, college funds, mortgages, and car payments. Maybe it wouldn't have the seductive edges of terror and madness. But we would have medical insurance and a retirement plan. Yet the United States proves to be as much a puzzle as a relief to Fuller. From its magnifying distance, her family begins to seem "even more careless, unbalanced and mad than they had when we'd all been in Africa. Meanwhile, close up, Charlie's family looked saner than I had believed it possible any family could be." On first meeting Charlie and hearing that his relatives were "Main Line" Philadelphians, she liked to think that this suggested something racy and illicit; she is disappointed that they prove "not to be heroin addicts at all", but of unimpeachably stodgy settler stock. Compared to the Africans Fuller grew up with, the Americans she encounters are emotional conservatives, spending their feelings frugally. And they spend time frugally. "In Africa," she notes, "we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest." But here "there seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights . . . Of course, I changed and sped up." The result of living in America is an uneasy erosion of Fuller's sense of self. To her dismay, she realises that identity is easily corruptible: "Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It's a commitment, not a flag. You can't just pull it out and wave it about when it's convenient." These reflections on time and change segue into a heart-wrenching dissection of the end of love and the death of a marriage. In the light of Fuller's remarks about cultural differences, it becomes clear that the failure of her union with Charlie is really a failure to establish a distinct culture of their own. As they fight over the purpose of their existence together, about how best to arrange the 24 hours of their day, their supposedly "safe, sane American lives" rapidly become as fraught as their earlier "crazy, diseased African ones". Theirs is, as Fuller admits, not a unique story - their mistake is to think that they alone can tackle marriage as a fresh pact, "distinct and separate from all the ways my grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done marriage . . . across seas, between cultures, and against all the odds" - but it is given depth by her consciousness of the bigger picture. Perhaps the most painful irony of all is that Fuller's drive to write, and her unnervingly honest voice, both come from this very sense of displacement. As the marriage falters, the books, with their acid humour, start to arrive. "Why don't you laugh at my jokes?" she asks her husband. "Because your jokes aren't funny," he replies. "They're unkind." But in spite of her tough truth-telling, Fuller's perceptions are anything but unkind. Her position on the margins makes her unusually sensitive to vulnerability of any sort. She is especially good at rendering the terrible physical and emotional fragility of children. Of her baby daughter, she remembers, with agonised tenderness, that "her white terrycloth diapers hung on a washing line above our heads in the sitting room and kitchen, like strings of white flags requesting ceasefire or signalling surrender". In the same way, her description of the infant corpses in the Lusaka cholera clinic breathes compassion without sacrificing a writer's grasp of our human need to bear witness: "Some of the bodies were so tiny they looked like punctuation marks, damp little commas, a brief pause between life and death." She is as unsparing of herself, skewering her own bewilderment and longing for love with a gallant belief in the primacy of truth, in the importance, in memoir, of telling things "the way they are". On the evidence of this urgent, eloquently fearless book, she is right. 272pp, Harvill Secker, pounds 16.99 To order Leaving Before the Rains Come for pounds 13.59 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Elizabeth Lowry Caption: Captions: Alexandra Fuller in Wyoming, July 2014 Yet the United States proves to be as much a puzzle as a relief to [Alexandra Fuller]. From its magnifying distance, her family begins to seem "even more careless, unbalanced and mad than they had when we'd all been in Africa. Meanwhile, close up, [Charlie Ross]'s family looked saner than I had believed it possible any family could be." On first meeting Charlie and hearing that his relatives were "Main Line" Philadelphians, she liked to think that this suggested something racy and illicit; she is disappointed that they prove "not to be heroin addicts at all", but of unimpeachably stodgy settler stock. Compared to the Africans Fuller grew up with, the Americans she encounters are emotional conservatives, spending their feelings frugally. And they spend time frugally. "In Africa," she notes, "we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest." But here "there seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights . . . Of course, I changed and sped up." The result of living in America is an uneasy erosion of Fuller's sense of self. To her dismay, she realises that identity is easily corruptible: "Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It's a commitment, not a flag. You can't just pull it out and wave it about when it's convenient." Perhaps the most painful irony of all is that Fuller's drive to write, and her unnervingly honest voice, both come from this very sense of displacement. As the marriage falters, the books, with their acid humour, start to arrive. "Why don't you laugh at my jokes?" she asks her husband. "Because your jokes aren't funny," he replies. "They're unkind." But in spite of her tough truth-telling, Fuller's perceptions are anything but unkind. Her position on the margins makes her unusually sensitive to vulnerability of any sort. She is especially good at rendering the terrible physical and emotional fragility of children. Of her baby daughter, she remembers, with agonised tenderness, that "her white terrycloth diapers hung on a washing line above our heads in the sitting room and kitchen, like strings of white flags requesting ceasefire or signalling surrender". In the same way, her description of the infant corpses in the Lusaka cholera clinic breathes compassion without sacrificing a writer's grasp of our human need to bear witness: "Some of the bodies were so tiny they looked like punctuation marks, damp little commas, a brief pause between life and death." She is as unsparing of herself, skewering her own bewilderment and longing for love with a gallant belief in the primacy of truth, in the importance, in memoir, of telling things "the way they are". On the evidence of this urgent, eloquently fearless book, she is right. - Elizabeth Lowry.
Kirkus Review
Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, 2012, etc.) resumes her memories of growing up in Africa in this wry, forthright and captivating memoir.This time, the focus is on the slow unraveling of her marriage to a man she thought would save her from her family's madness and chaos. Except for her father's insistence that his children bathe and dress formally for dinnera gesture toward discipline that emerged nowhere elseFuller's childhood was as wild as the Zambian landscape. Her father made "absolute, capricious, and patriarchal" rules. Boredom, he announced, was "the worst possible sin." Despite, or perhaps because of, his idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the author idolized him. Her mother, with a family history of mental instability, often succumbed to "long, solo voyages into her dark, grief-disturbed interior," fueled by alcohol. Resembling her physically, Fuller feared that along with "all that Scottish passion," she might inherit madness, as well: "how could I have skipped the place where her ingenuity and passion sat too close to insanity on the spiraling legacy of heritage?" Unsurprisingly, she married an adventurous, dependable man who she thought would provide stability and order. Her husband "was the perfect rescuer," she writes, "and I the most relieved and grateful rescue victim." After a few years in Africa, they moved to America, where living was easier (dependable electricity and running water, for example), unthreatened by political uprisings or rampaging elephants. They had children, but financial pressures, especially after 2008, and her own loneliness gradually took a toll: "Ours had contracted into a grocery-list relationshipfinances, children, housekeeping." To reclaim her life, she insisted on divorce. Although her batty and unhinged relatives emerge more vividly than her taciturn husband, Fuller's talent as a storyteller makes this memoir sing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) follows her two previous memoirs about her childhood during the Rhodesian wars with this third memoir about the dissolution of her marriage and her return to Africa. The doomed union is traced from the couple's Zambian courtship to its end in the wake of Fuller's husband's near-fatal horse-riding accident in the United States. Fuller's family again plays a large role as the author reflects on the circumstances that shaped both her personality and her expectations for her life. Fans of Fuller's previous work will enjoy the opportunity to revisit her eccentric family and learn more about the unconventional lifestyle of Zambian farmers. Fuller's prose throughout is exquisite, poetic, and rich with her unique voice. The audiobook features narration by the author, heightening the intimacy of the story. VERDICT This title will appeal to Fuller's fans as well as those looking for a read-alike to Elizabeth Gilbert's memoirs. Recommended for all collections.-Julie -Judkins, Univ. of North Texas, Denton © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
***The following excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Alexandra Fuller Dad says he's going to die next week," Vanessa said. The phone line from Zambia was good for once. No echoing, no hopping, no static. Still, I felt the distancing power of the whole of the Atlantic Ocean between us. "Say that again," I said. "Dad," repeated Vanessa loudly and slowly, as if she were an Englishwoman-on-vacation in the tropics. "He says he's not going to bat some other chap's innings. He says it's not cricket." I heard her light a cigarette: the scrape and hiss of a match; the singe of burning tobacco; the capacious inhale. I recognized we were in danger of doing things on Vanessa's indolent schedule. She would be there south of the equator cultivating nonchalance. I would be here north of it conscious of time-lapsing deadlines. "Why?" I asked. "Of what?" "The Bible," Vanessa said, calmly exhaling. "Oh," I said. "Well, no one in their right mind takes the Bible literally." "I do," Vanessa said. "Exactly," I triumphed. I pictured Vanessa at the picnic table on her veranda, a generous helping of South African white wine in front of her. Mosquitoes would be whining around her ankles poisonously. She'd be wiping sweat off her nose, pushing panting dogs away from her lap. I could also hear the rainy-?season chorus of Southern Hemisphere woodland-?living birds in the background. The tyranny of a Heuglin's robin, some chattering masked weavers, and a Sombre bulbul shouting over and over, "Willie! Come out and fight! Willie! Come out and fight! Scaaared." Meanwhile the austerity of winter was still hanging on here. Outside my office window, there were tiny beams of frozen mud showing through tall snowbanks. The only birds I could see were an industrious banditry of black-?capped chickadees at the suet feeder. They seemed robustly ascetic little creatures, like tiny chattering monks. I'd read they are able to lower their body temperature by up to a dozen degrees on cold winter nights to conserve energy. Torpor was the word the bird books used. Hummingbirds supposedly did the same thing, but they also had to eat sixty times their body weight a day just to stay alive, at least according to a fragment of a poem by Charles Wright I kept above my computer. "Now that's a life on the edge," the fragment concludes. "I have to go," I said. But Vanessa had begun to expand on her vision for Dad's funeral arrangements and she was in full voice now. Should there be an old Land Rover or a donkey cart for a hearse? And was that Polish priest from Old Mkushi still alive, the one who had been at my wedding? Because he had lived in the bush long enough not to blink if we asked him to have the service under a baobab tree instead of in a church, right? And perhaps we could get people from the villages to make a choir. "There are heaps of those Apostles all over the place," Vanessa pointed out. "But do they sing, or do they just sit around draped in white bedsheets, moaning?" I said I didn't know, but I'd never forget the time Mum got in a dustup with the Apostle who had moved onto the edge of the farm with his several wives and his scores of children and whose vegetable plot had strayed onto her overflowing pet cemetery. Mum had yelled obscenities, planted her walking stick in the soil, and declared turf war. In return, the Apostle had thrown rocks at Mum's surviving dogs, brandished his staff, and recited bellicose passages from the Old Testament. "An apoplectic apostolic," Mum had reported with relish, although her neck had been out for weeks after the Apostle shook her, "just like Jack Russell with a rat." Vanessa took another considered drag off her cigarette. "Oh right," she said. "I'd forgotten about that. Maybe Catholics might be better after all. They'll know proper hymns. Plus Catholics have wine at intermission, don't they? And Mum doesn't have a history of battling them, does she?" "Not yet," I said. "And what about entertainment for afterwards?" Vanessa asked. "People will have driven for days. They'll be expecting a thrash. It'll have to be a huge party from beginning to end, with a calypso band, Harry Belafonte, and buckets of rum punch. Perhaps we could organize boat races on the Zambezi in dugout canoes. That would be groovy. And what about a greasy pole over one of Mum's fishponds for the especially inebriated mourners, because you know it's going to be Alcoholics Unanimous from beginning to end? And maybe we could have a maze like the one we had at Mum and Dad's fortieth anniversary," Vanessa said. "Remember?" I would never forget that either. There had been shots of something fairly stiff at the entrance to the maze, and some guests got so drunk right off the bat they were stranded in dead ends until dawn. But I didn't bring this up, nor did I say that I thought Vanessa's suggestions were murderously bad. How many funerals did she want in one week? In the interests of time (mine, chiefly) I said I thought they were all ideas worth considering. "That is, when Dad is actually dead," I said. And then I added, in a way that I hoped suggested a signing off, "Okay, Van. I'm quite busy here." But Vanessa wouldn't be deterred; she poured herself another glass of wine and rattled on. "No, no, no," she said. "We have to plan now, we'll be too distraught at the time." She reminded me she wouldn't be able to do any of the readings because she was illiterate, as well we all knew. Mum certainly couldn't do a reading, or much of anything, because she would be an inconsolable wreck. And Richard shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a pulpit. "He'll just grunt and growl and terrify the congregation," Vanessa said. "No, Al, when Dad dies, you're going to have to do the urology." A week later, March 8, 2010, Dad turned seventy. The day came and went, and in spite of Psalm 90:10 my father didn't die. To prove the miracle of his continued corporal existence among us, Vanessa e-mailed me a photograph of his funeral party turned birthday bash. There he was on her veranda in the Kafue hills, his arm around Mum's shoulders. My parents were wearing matching straw hats and expressions of matching lopsided hilarity. Between them, they were holding a bouquet of beaten-up-looking yellow flowers. Daffodils, I thought, but I wasn't sure. For one thing-- due to the camera shaking, or the subjects swaying-- the photograph was a little blurry. And for another thing, Vanessa steals most of her flowers from Lusaka hotel gardens, and daffodils seemed unlikely for all sorts of reasons. I felt a pang of jealous nostalgia, although pang is the wrong word because that suggests something satiable, like hunger. And nostalgia isn't quite right either, because that suggests a sentimental view of the past, like Artie Shaw or Doris Day was the soundtrack for my youth, but it wasn't. That was my parents' soundtrack. Vanessa and I listened to the Swedish pop group ABBA. We had Clem Tholet, the Rhodesian folksinger, ever a popular star at the annual Bless 'Em All Troop Shows. We learned to dance to Ipi Ntombi's "The Warrior." My family's history-- with its very real, inevitable consequences-- defied romantic longing. Although Dad believes the only side you can reliably count on is your own, and Vanessa sometimes dispenses irrevocable threats to never talk to any of us again, and my mother carries an impressive grudge--" I sometimes forget, but I will never ever forgive"--my family mostly gets over it, whatever it is, and they move on. They have to be in the ever-?replenishing present, partly because it is filled with ever-?replenishing uncertainty; there are always fresh crises coming hot on the heels of the old ones. "No rest for the beautiful," Dad says. "Wicked," I correct him. "Them too probably." Over the years, there have been other phone calls. It is usually Vanessa: "Oh Al, nightmare! There was a black mamba in the kids' room," that was once. Another time, she reported that Mum had returned from her morning walk around the farm to find a rabid dog sitting weirdly placid under the Tree of Forgetfulness. "You know what Mum's like. Luckily she realized it wasn't acting normally and she didn't try to stroke it or invite it to sleep on the sofa or anything." Then there were the few surreal months when crocodiles flooded out of the Zambezi in unusual numbers and plagued my parents' farm. They were not only in Mum's fishponds as usual, but also in Dad's banana plantation; sunbathing outside Mr. Zulu's house in the morning; casually scraping their way past the watchman's hut toward the sheep pen at night. I seldom told Charlie about the phone calls and I rarely shared with him the freshest dramas from Zambia in part because I had learned over time that the events we Fullers found hilarious or entertaining did not always amuse my American husband. Charlie was a gallant one-?man intervention wanting to save us from our recklessness, quietly stepping in whenever he thought we were drinking excessively, ruining our health with cigarettes, or courting intestinal disaster with undercooked chicken. This made the Fullers howl with laughter and did nothing to make them behave differently. One year, in a fit of common sense, I sent a case of Off! insect repellent to the farm in the hope it would reduce the incidence of familial malaria. "Bobo sent us gallons of Bugger Off for Christmas," Dad told anyone who showed up under the Tree of Forgetfulness that year. "Go ahead, squirt yourself with as much as you like. Shower in it. Have a bath." I still felt a little torn. For a long time, I had tried to be profoundly grateful to Charlie for his impulse of wanting to rescue us from our chaos, and I had even tried to believe in his systems of control and protection the way I had once tried to believe in God. But deep down I always knew there is no way to order chaos. It's the fundamental theory at the beginning and end of everything; it's the ultimate law of nature. There's no way to win against unpredictability, to suit up completely against accidents. Which isn't to say I didn't embrace the Western idea that it was possible--"Good God, you look as if you're about to shoot yourselves out of a cannon," Dad said when he saw Charlie and me dressed for a bicycle ride in Lycra, elbow pads, and crash helmets-- but I understood that as much as it is craziness to court danger, disaster, and mishap, it is also craziness to believe that everything can be charted, ordered, and prevented. It's also more boring. When I phoned home on Sunday mornings, Mum and Dad were usually at the pub below the banana plantation, overlooking the Zambezi River. It's evening for them, and they're taking a couple hours to put their feet up at the bar. Generally, a few drinks have imbued them with extra rations of optimism. Most often, Dad answers first, shouting even if the line is clear. "Fit as a flea," he usually says, or "Not bad for an old goat." He rarely elaborates, because in spite of an influx of competitively cheap talk time into Zambia (available for purchase at every intersection in Lusaka and in numerous kiosks all over Chirundu), Dad maintains the telegram-?abrupt phone manners of someone for whom long-?distance calls are a prohibitively expensive luxury. "I'll hand you over to Mum," he says as soon as the absolute preliminaries have been completed. Then it's her turn to shout contagious enthusiasm at me from their noisy world to my habitually hushed one. She holds the receiver up so I can listen to the birds, the cicadas, and the frogs, and I can hear Dad objecting to this folly: "Bloody expensive conversation Bobo is having with a bunch of fresh air." But Mum shushes him and says, "Did you hear that?" And if the dogs begin barking she says, "Oh, the adorable little terrorists, can you hear them. Say hello to Bobo, Sprocket. Harry, say woof!" Sometimes she says, "And oh listen! The hippos are scolding us." And then she holds the phone up to the river, but all I can hear is Dad complaining: "Good Lord, Tub, we're not the bloody Rockefellers." But Mum ignores him and rattles on anyway. "Big excitement this week," she was telling me now. "We got invited to a party in Lusaka. You know, those people with all the consonants in their names. Tiny blobs of caviar, well, trout eggs really, not sturgeon obviously, and scary amounts of vodka." "Scary?" "Yes, so by the time we were ready to leave the party, your father had already had far too much excitement. He climbed onto the roof of the pickup and refused to come down," Mum says. "What?" I hold the receiver out from my ear and stare at it in delight. These are my late-?middle-?aged parents! They are grandparents nine times over. I put the phone back to my ear. "Then what?" I ask. "I had to drive off with him like that," Mum says. "And you know what a terrible driver I am. Heaven only knows how we made it home. I was halfway to Makeni before it dawned on me that I might be driving on the wrong side of the road." "Dawned on you?" "Well, Bobo, you know what drivers are these days. I thought they were hooting at me because they wanted me to go faster." "So?" "I drove faster, of course," Mum says. "Dad was thumping on the roof but I assumed he was just singing the 'Hallelujah' chorus or Tchaikovsky's bells and cannons. How was I to know he wanted to come down? Oh, it was such a performance." I shut my eyes and pictured the soft, hot world at the bottom of the farm, with the river lazily curling its way east to Mozambique, and my parents contributing to a general sense of easygoing mayhem in their inimitable way. By contrast, my days were amorphously mapped out with the repeating tasks of laundry and meals and deadlines. And I was more and more drained by an increasingly fraught effort to shore myself up against the belief system I had borrowed. "Well, situation normal here," I say. "Nothing new to report." My parents pitied me the fact that-- at least as far as they could tell-- all my dramas had to be self-?inflicted. They considered the acceptance of the certainty of pandemonium an essential ingredient to the enjoyment of life. "Don't yell so loudly or everyone will want them," Dad said when, on a visit home, a plague of insects and a couple of geckos rained out of the thatch roof of the spare bedroom onto my mosquito net. Nothing surprised him, not the rabid dogs, or the snakes, not the hippos and elephants. "Although the novelty's beginning to wear off a bit," he admitted. It takes a kind of outrageous courage-- recklessness even, I might have said once-- to revel in the pattern of that much definite chaos. I had been raised in this way, and I had loved much of my early life, and of course I loved my family, but at some point I had lost the mettle and the imagination to surrender to the promise of perpetual insecurity. Instead I chose to believe in the possibility of a predictable, chartable future, and I had picked a life that I imagined would have certainties, safety nets, and assurances. What I did not know then is that the assurances I needed couldn't be had. I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide-- against those things, there is no conventional guard. "The problem with most people," Dad said once, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, "is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Excerpted from Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
And Away We Fly | p. 1 |
Madness in Prescribed Doses | p. 11 |
Decisions by Dionysus | p. 25 |
Mr. Adventure's Immunity | p. 37 |
Marital Advice from a Mildly Stoned Cook | p. 49 |
Marriage Vows in the Time of Malaria | p. 57 |
Continental Drift | p. 63 |
Marriage Advice from the End of the World | p. 69 |
Signal Flags | p. 79 |
The Midday Sun | p. 89 |
Last Call on the African Queen | p. 99 |
This Grand Inheritance | p. 111 |
Marriage in the Time of Cholera | p. 129 |
Babies in the Time of Yellow Fever | p. 147 |
Mad Beans, Time, and Ghosts | p. 167 |
The River Runner and the Rat Race | p. 187 |
Fortune Teller Fish | p. 207 |
Falling | p. 219 |
Broken | p. 241 |
Cry for a Whole People | p. 249 |