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Travel light, move fast / Alexandre Fuller.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: London, England : Serpent's tail, 2019Copyright date: ©2019Description: 225 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781788163835
  • 1788163834
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Summary: When her father becomes gravely ill on holiday in Budapest, Alexandra Fuller rushes to join her mother at his bedside where they see out his last days together. As they carry his ashes home to their family farm in Zambia and begin to grieve together, Fuller realises that if she is going to weather her father's loss, she will need to become the parts of him that she misses most. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death, and her memories of a childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. And her own life begins to change. She faces seemingly irreparable family fallout, new love found and lost, and eventually further, unimaginable bereavement, holding fast to the lessons her father taught her about how to survive, whatever life throws at you.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Biographies Davis (Central) Library Non-Fiction Non-Fiction B FUL Available T00820420
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight , the utterly original story of her father, Tim Fuller, and a deeply felt tribute to a life well lived.

First published in the USA in 2019 by Penguin Press.

When her father becomes gravely ill on holiday in Budapest, Alexandra Fuller rushes to join her mother at his bedside where they see out his last days together. As they carry his ashes home to their family farm in Zambia and begin to grieve together, Fuller realises that if she is going to weather her father's loss, she will need to become the parts of him that she misses most. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death, and her memories of a childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. And her own life begins to change. She faces seemingly irreparable family fallout, new love found and lost, and eventually further, unimaginable bereavement, holding fast to the lessons her father taught her about how to survive, whatever life throws at you.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Chapter One In the Unlikely Event of Money, Buy Two Tickets to Paris Oh, hello, Bobo," Dad said, waking up from an induced coma to find me by his bedside. He looked around as best he could. "Bus station?" he asked. "Budapest," I said. "Oh?" Dad said, fretting the lines and tubes that ran to his mouth and into his nose and into needles that disappeared under his skin where the Zambian sun had scalded an indelible brown line across his neck. The veins on his hands stood out, a worker's hands, muscled and thick; there were needles slipped in there too. "The poor man's Paris," I explained, cupping his hands in mine, the way you catch a large moth, gingerly. "Ah," Dad said, relaxing a bit. Dad loved Paris in the spring; he loved Paris, the whole song. Something had happened to him there the year he left high school; love perhaps, or his first taste of freedom from the boiled-­cabbage, gin-­wrecked gloom of his British upbringing. After that, for the rest of his life, every time he came into extra money, which wasn't often, he'd threaten to buy two tickets to Paris. "Those Frogs know how it's done. Start with champagne, end with absinthe; bring your dog to supper and no one gives a merde if you get off with the waiter," he said. Dad took my mother to Paris three times; he'd taken me once. He tried to get my sister to go for her fortieth birthday, but Vanessa had just delivered her sixth child and had endured a subsequently exhausting recovery in a noisy Lusaka clinic and she wasn't in the mood to race our father to the top of the Eiffel Tower, or to savor new-­in-­season blackberries with a bottle of plonk on the Île de la Cité. "If I show up with two tickets to Paris, will you come with me?" Dad had always asked the Scottish nurse with the cobalt-blue eyes who'd been our neighbor in southern Africa, back in the days my parents tried their hand at farming in a war zone. Auntie Rena, Vanessa and I had called her; in a war, you feel related to everyone, trauma bonded. "Why yes, Tim," Auntie Rena had always replied. Dad hated hospitals. "They won't let you smoke, you can't get a drink when you really need one, and they always want to poke you in places not designed for poking." He hated doctors too, on account of their propensity to attract dying or wounded people. "Then finish off the job." He'd only been in a hospital one other time, back in the seventies, after he'd run himself over while fixing the brakes on a car, also during our farming-­in-­a-­war-­zone phase. The workshop, built by the previous owner of the farm, a melancholy alcoholic, wasn't level. "Should be good drainage though," Dad said, looking on the bright side of the noticeably tilted pounded-­dirt floor. "If there's a flood." But this was revolutionary-­era Rhodesia--­as it was back then, unpredictable, upended, brilliant--­and our farm was in a rain shadow, so although we had floods, mostly we had drought, and it was a heavy, mine-­proofed station wagon that had slowly rolled over Dad while the workshop staff looked on in impotent horror. "Poor Dad," Mum had said. "Squashed flat as a cockroach and still he kept insisting there was nothing wrong with him that couldn't be fixed with an aspirin and a couple of brandies." Everyone hit panic stations; rare in Rhodesia, it went against our professed national character. We were the manliest of people. "Your father was the first person to be medevaced to town from the valley," Mum said, her nose twitching wistfully. "Until then, people just had to bite the bullet; and in very serious cases, we were rattled into the hospital in a mine-­proof Land Rover. No shock absorbers to speak of." It was as if she were explaining to me a sepia-­colored version of a life she'd known well, a life that included my father, but which I could barely grasp, as if I'd been nowhere near the actual bright, bloody intensity of it all myself. "Absolute agony for the victim," Mum said. "I remember," I said. "But not," Mum continued, "your father. Paul Dickenson, bless him, drove Dad in his Mercedes-­Benz"--­there was a pause, so I'd have the opportunity to appreciate the full extent of what Mum had just said--­"to Brian Van Buren's airstrip and Brian flew him straight to the airfield in Umtali over enemy lines." Things were beginning to blur a little in Mum's narrative, I could tell, Out of Africa merging with one of those dashing Second World War movies she loves. But in our real life, in our little Rhodesian Bush War, there really were no enemy lines, no helpful German accents; God and restraint were long gone. There was only the country left; the soil, I mean, and blood. And the three warring factions: white settlers scattered fatly here, there, everywhere; the Mashona kraaled in the northern two-­thirds of the country, the Matabele in the south. To the death, we white settlers vowed. Naturally, the Mashona and Matabele had no choice but to make the same vow. Even a small child could tell it was going to be a long war, a rotten mess. The black insurgents had the open support of North Korea, China, and Bono; they were tougher than it's possible to imagine, enduring and patient. They'd been here forever and a generation. Some of those musoja must have been poets, dancers, farmers; war must have been harder for them to wage. Still, the ancestors were with them. The white Rhodesians had the support of the United States, Israel, South Africa, and the UK; they were well trained, well armed, and ruthless. Most of their army was made up of paid black locals bossed about by white conscripts. A whole country of soldiers, but some of those conscripts must also have been poets, dancers, monks; ruthlessness must have been harder for them to perform. They were ancestor-­abandoned and -­abandoning. Dad was assigned to a local unit on the eastern front, which wasn't difficult to find, we were standing on it, but it wasn't easy once he got there. He fought six months of every year with a handful of other white men, neighboring farmers, brothers in arms. They were supposed to stop insurgents coming from Mozambique into Rhodesia. Dad didn't talk about it much; unless in his sleep. Mum didn't need to be told; she volunteered. She pledged to dig in as if we were seven generations into the place, as if we had actual skin in the game. She gamely donned the uniform, a horrible boxy dress in heavy polyester that would have been better suited to the Bavarian Alps, say, than to the sweltering valleys of eastern Rhodesia. "Well, obviously we didn't think the war would go on for so long, or that we'd lose," Mum said afterward. She glared at me. "It was a shock when Robert Mugabe got in; I knew exactly what that meant. Or perhaps you don't remember." I do remember. Also what happened next, I remembered that too, although it's not just one story, it's thousands of stories, millions maybe. And it's not just our story, or we're in the story, but it didn't happen only to us; it happened to other people too, and we happened upon it in equal measure. In unequal measure, I should say. It'd be generations before the shock waves left the land. Or it is generations; we're still there. "So, of course, we stuck it out," Mum concluded. Ours was a nation in a state at war with itself, no doubt; bodies piled up. We all had family on the front, unless they'd already been taken out, as we said, scribbled, donnered. But the Scripture Union teacher at our junior school reassured us that the blacks had whatever they gave coming back to them. "The sins of the father will be visited onto their children, even unto their children's children," she said. Meantime, there were army camps and minefields. There were suburbs behind razor wire, dogs patrolling clipped lawns. There were convoys, curfews, sanctions, and censorship. The whole country had been turned into one vast, confusing battlefield and there was no getting off it. "Oh, Bobo," Mum says. "You do exaggerate." Mum prefers not to remember the war, or anything about our lives, the way I do. All her stories have the clicking-celluloid and worn-­velvet comfort of an old cinema. As a result, her stories are better than mine, more vividly imagined, less depressing. "And from the airfield," Mum continued brightly, "Dad was taken straight to Umtali General in an ambulance. Imagine! He yelled and yelled. He wanted to be taken to the Wise Owl, the Impala Arms, the Cecil Hotel, anywhere but the hospital. I had to hear all about it from the stretcher-­bearers afterward." Mum paused. "Not that it would have made any difference. The driver couldn't hear Dad's desperate entreaties above the wail of the sirens. Oh, those were the good old days, Bobo. There was always something exciting going on." Like love, war's a bloody mess when it's happening, and a worse mess when it's over; but with any distance, you can look back at either and see only the glory, or only the pain. The dusk-­obscured truth--­somewhere in the middle of all our human messiness--­is very difficult to recognize. Honestly, it's so faint through the dim pewter gloaming; it may not even be there at all, shapeless and formless. Perhaps it's God, or time, or all things; it's grace in any case. Some soldiers claim to have seen it through gun smoke; women pushing life into the world might catch a glimpse of it; it's in the start of everything and in everyone's end, surely. But to have clarity in the routine of your ordinary life, not at the very end, or in extremis: That's amazing grace; and you don't just wake up there either. There's always a terrible waiting period, a purgatory of doubt, between the suffering and the grace. That's the lonely alone work, weathering the places in between, and dismantling oneself piece by piece meantime, shredding all that can be shredded, returning to dust all that can be eroded. Amazing grace appears when all faith has fled; when final exhaustion has set in; when there're no trails to follow and one carries on anyway. "Travel light," my father always said. "Move fast." He followed that advice, practiced what he preached, like it was a key tenet of his personal religion. "When you're all the way down to the bone," he'd told me once, "tobacco, tea, and a mosquito net; that's all you need." When you're all the way down to the bone. Dad greatly admired a good sufferer; he remarked on it. Rural southern Africans came in for his highest praise. "Five hundred years of practice, poor bastards," Dad said. The Brits were useless, in his estimation, except the queen. "She can take it on the chin all right." The Italians were undignified. "They cry for their mothers," Dad said. And it was hard to tell with Americans, "because it's all a bit loud." The annex of the men's ward of the Umtali General Hospital, where Dad was taken to recover from running himself over, was a new, low-­slung barracks hastily erected to accommodate war casualties flooding in from the officially recognized eastern front. "Well, that was literally our kitchen door," Mum explained with studied humility. "It was us, Bobo, and beyond that, it was them." Injured soldiers sat outside in the sun, or slowly walked about, the ones who could, mouths frozen in a perpetual "oh," as if the vehement amazement of whatever blast had brought them here was still working its way out of their bodies. "Stop gawking," ­Va­nessa reminded me. Excerpted from Travel Light, Move Fast 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Grieving the loss of her father, Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) revisits her tumultuous upbringing "farming in a war zone" during the Rhodesian Bush War in the 1970s through the present day in this arresting memoir. The book opens in 2015 Budapest, where she sits vigil over her father, Tim, in a hospital ICU for 12 days, recalling how his restlessness kept his young family moving from one remote location to another, before he dies. Madcap events involving oddball characters play out as Fuller plans for his cremation and her mother's return to their farm in Zambia. Four months after Tim's death, the family gathers to scatter his ashes, and Fuller introduces her fiancé, an American artist she lives with in Wyoming. Old wounds reopen over her "Awful Books"--bestselling memoirs she's written about the family--and in the aftermath she's estranged from her sister, her writing stalls, and her engagement breaks off. Just before book's end, an unforeseen death in July 2018 engulfs her in pain that "would have no end, it would have no shape, it would shape me." Darkly comic dialogue deepens Fuller's piercing narrative, yet Tim's timeless wisdom strikes the most resonant note: "It'll be all right in the end; if it isn't all right, it isn't the end." Beautifully crafted, Fuller's moving memoir flows with precision and compassion. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

As she's done since her sublime debut memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), Fuller transports readers to Central Africa where she was raised and where her parents have a sprawling farm. But this time her subject matter is a somber one: the death of her father, the larger-than-life "Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode." Fuller chronicles his sudden decline on a trip to Budapest with his wife of five decades, Fuller's effervescent mother, Nicola, and Fuller herself. Fuller is deeply saddened by her father dying so far from the land that he loved, but most of this gorgeously written reminiscence is comprised of vignettes from the beautiful life her vivacious parents shared together, focusing on their purchase of a Zimbabwean fish farm at an age when most people would be ready to retire. After four memoirs that chronicle, in whole or in part, Fuller and her family's lives in Africa, her family remains endlessly fascinating and delightful companions for long-time readers and new ones alike. When Fuller reveals an even more devastating loss in the final pages, it's a gut-punch that will leave readers aching for her. A gorgeously written tribute to a life well lived and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable loss and grief.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A memoirist reflects on the lessons of her father, a man with an insatiable lust for life." Travel light,' my father always said. Move fast,' " writes Fuller (Quiet Until the Thaw, 2017, etc.). "He followed that advice, practiced what he preached, like it was a key tenet of his personal religion." The author's anecdotal tribute to her late father brims with snippets and snatches of Tim Fuller's whirlwind lifestyle. The first part of the narrative covers their time in Budapest, where she and her mother watched as Tim, stricken with pneumonia, died in a hospital bed. As the text progresses, Fuller peels back layer after layer of the character of her father, a highly textured world traveler who navigated life using his own compass. Leaving his native Britain behind, he set out to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War. After meeting his true love and having two daughters, they settled in Zambia, where Tim acquired a banana plantation along the Zambezi River. The author ably chronicles this tumultuous transition era, with its constantly changing governments and economic instability. But at its heart, the book is an intimate character study of a spontaneity-loving wild man who, in his younger years, amused himself swerving his car toward the "do-gooder" foreign aid workers and clearing life's hurdles with a good smoke and a whiskey double. "For him, everything was about time," she writes, "burning through it the way he did." Over the decades, the wily expat continued etching his colorful legend into Zambezi Valley lore as the author made off for America, now a traveler in her own right. Tasked to come to terms with his physical absence, she sifted through a lifetime of memories in order to pen this celebration of the man whose profound influence helped shape her own worldview. Fuller writes gracefully about embracing grief as an indelible part of the human experience.Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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