ISBN: | 9780345814852 |
Publisher: | Random House Canada |
Format: | Hardcover |
Editions: |
14 other editions
of this product
|
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015: The key to a great memoir may be less in the story it tells than in the voice and eye of the storyteller. In Leaving Before the Rains Come, Alexandra Fuller’s third memoir (she also wrote two other books of nonfiction), the author confirms what readers of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight detected on first reading of that debut: Fuller belongs in the pantheon of great memoirists, right alongside Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and Frank McCourt. Not unlike those writers, Fuller has a single trope – hers is a childhood spent as a British expat on a farm in revolution-torn southern Africa – that she uses over and over to define and clarify her life The title expression, for example, is a south Africanism for "get out while you can," and throughout this heartfelt book, she uses experiences, images and memories from her twenty years in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and from the people she knew there, to illustrate more contemporary and local places and states of mind. Here, the focus is on the men in her life – for one, her heavy-drinking, plain-talking, fatalistic father who says thing like "Those who talk the most, usually have the least to say." The other is Charlie, her now-ex-husband, an American mainline Philadelphia neo-cowboy who seems at first to be the perfect strong-and-sensitive type, all pragmatism to her barely controlled (but charming) chaos. While the book is ostensibly about their union, and its
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