Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, narrated by Lisette Lecat.
Recorded Books, 2002. 9 discs.
I chose this audiobook because I love Lisette Lecat's narration. I have listened to all of the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency audios, which she narrated in her beautifully expressive voice. I wasn't disappointed with the story, either.
Fuller tells the story of her childhood spent first in Rhodesia, where the family moved when she was two, then Malawi and Zambia. The Fullers were not wealthy, in fact, seemed on the edge of poverty. They lived a hardscrabble, unconventional existance. Her memoir is honest, unsentimental, and unflinching, told with humor and love.
Fuller has wonderfully descriptive passages of life in Africa. For example, here's a particularly vivid passage:
The heat in the kitchen is breath-sucking. There are two small windows at either end of the huge tacked-together room, and one stable door, which leads off to the back veranda where the diaryman (surrounded by a halo of flies) labors over the milk churh (milk spits into buckets, cream chugs into a jug; both are in danger of going off before they can reach refrigeration). The fridges, unable to compete with the heat, lead (they bleed, actually: thin watered down blood from defrosting chunks of cow) and add a fusty-smelling steam to the atmosphere. The aroma here is defrosting flesh, soon-to-be-off milk, sweating butter, and the always present salty-meat-old-vegetable effuvium of the dogs' stew toiling away on the stove.
And yet, in spite of this:
...a maid with a charcoal iron sweats over piles of clothes. She sprinkles water onto the back of her neck and onto the clothes ad slams the charcoal iron down onto the table where her ironing lies. Her sweat sprinkles the cloth along with the specks of water, and singes up with the steam. The crescent-shaped air vents in the iron glow fiercely red with fresh coals. The clothes are ironed to paper in the heat and crisp, starched with sweat.
I reminded me of how my mother would fire up the stove, even on a sweltering summer day to cook dinner. Georgia summers don't compare with African ones, I'm sure, but it goes to show. We would beg her to fix sandwiches or something that didn't require four burners and an oven but she wouldn't have it.
At first, Fuller's mother seemed harsh with her daughter but after all, this was Africa: no room for coddling. Alexandra grew up able to cope with numerous aggravations and hardships that most of us would have run from. Fleas, mosquitoes, snakes, the heat, the drought, the rains, the mud...no thanks!
I thoroughly enjoyed this audio. I could listen to Lecat's narration all day.
If you haven't heard her renditions of McCall Smith's series, please give them a try.
