Catching Idle Butterflies

World's Apart Brought Closer

How do you choose a book?

Strolling through aisles and aisles of shelves, each heavy-laden with books of all conceivable colors, titles and authors, what grabs your attention enough to not only pick that one out of hundreds off the shelf, but shove it underneath your arm and hurry to the pay counter because you simply can't wait to break it open and disappear into a new world? (I dare you to write a longer sentence than that one, and still have it make sense).

I'm not talking the authors or genre of books you normally read, but one that happens to be in the section you normally ignore, and an author you've never heard of.

What then made you purchase that book?

Yesterday at Barnes and Noble, I discovered an answer to that question. Waiting for my hubby as he picked up a pre-ordered book and flipped through machinists magazines, I perused the biography section. I had zero intention of finding anything, but merely to pass the time.

And then I saw it. My name in print. Well, the first name anyway.

The title intrigued me more: "Scribbling the Cat." Now what kind of title is that? I picked it up and read the back:

IT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LOOK TOO DEEPLY INTO YOUR OWN HISTORY AND FALL HEADLONG INTO THE PAST.

An engrossing and haunting tale of love, godliness, hate, war, and survival, Scribbling the Cat is the story of Alexandra Fuller's unusual friendship with "K" - a strangely charismatic white African and Rhodesian War veteran. With the same disarmingly unguarded prose that won her critical acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller recounts the journey she makes with K into the lands that hold the scars of their war, from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and into Mozambique. Driven by memories, they venture, in this modern-day Heart of Darkness, deeper into the countries' remote bush, where they encounter other veterans and survivors, and confront the demon of K's past - a violent war marked with racial strife, jungle battles, torture, and the murdering of innocent civilians.

I did buy this book, but I'm not reading it. I'm reading instead her first book "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight." It's partly due to not liking to read a series of books out of order, but mostly because it recounts her childhood in Africa.

1/5 through it so far, I'm gripped by not only the life she lived while in the middle of a civil war in Zimbabwe, but she recounts her experiences with a terrible honesty and dark poetry. From page 57-58:

I only know of a few people who have gone over [land]mines.

A girl who attended the high school in Umtali went over a mine and had her legs blown off but she lived. She was brave and beautiful and when she got married in South Africa a few years after the accident, Fair Lady magazine wrote a big article about her and showed photographs of her walking down the aisle of a church all frothy in a white dress and a long white veil and with the help of bridesmaids and crutches.

Fanie Vorster, who is a farmer in the Burma Valley, went over a mine, too, but he did not get his legs blown off. If he had, it might have given children a chance to run away from him when he tried to trap them in his spare bedroom and pin them to the single bed with his fat gray-hair-sprouting belly while mums and dads drank coffee in the kitchen with his stick-insect purple-mottled bruised-and-battered wife. Fanie Vorster didn't even get a headache when he went over the mine because he was in a mineproofed Land Rover, so the back end of it blew off and left the cab intact with Fanie inside, not at all hurt. He sat on the side of the road and smoked a cigarette until help came along.

Which goes to show, all prayers aren't answered.

I have to thank zwisis for the third reason I picked up these two books.

Part of the reason we have difficulty tearing away from our favorite bloggers is because we want to know everything about them. I'm reading these books not just for Alexandra's and in part Zimbabwe's story, but zwisis's. She's written so much about her home country, the heartbreaks as well what's loveable about it, I want to know more.