Scribbling the Cat

1. Fuller tells us right from the beginning what she intends to do in the story, no more and no less. Beginning: “This is a true story about a man and about the journey that I took with that man. It is a story about the continuing relationship that grew between the man and me and it is a story about the land over which we journeyed. But it is only my story; a slither of a slither of a much greater story. It is not supposed to be an historic document of fact.” She has been criticized for leading us on to believe there is a romantic entanglement between herself and K. Do you feel she has not done a good enough job in dispelling that notion?

2. She says her themes are an “exploration of life and death and fear of living and dying and the difficulty of separating love and judgment from passion and duty.” Can you elaborate by detailing the lives of several of the characters in the story?

3. Race and race relations are a big issue in South Africa which entirely occupies the attitudes and psyche of Bobo, K. and Mapenga

4. I personally liked how Bobo did not give everything up. She remained incohate about her own analysis on South African politics, its men, her position there in a man’s world filled with all its crudities and barbarities. How did you respond to her silence?

5. To me this is a roadie story like Ken Kesey’s or Jack Kerouacs, only with cigarettes as shared rituals, some booze from time to time, and tearaway behaviour from the men. What keeps your interest in where they are going and what is happening?

6. Like Martel’s Life of Pi, there is a lion in the story yet, this is not a symbolic novel but a realistic one. This is no Eden either, moreso a Purgatory or Hellish landscape. “Doves bobbed stiffly over the road, picking at split grain and complaining softly that no one cared, no one cared. They’d never care.” Echoes of Kafka in tone to me. Do you see how the landscape mirrors psychological attitude.

7. I admire Fuller’s economy of style. In very brief words, she manages to influence our attitude towards her parents: sexing the fish, dad reading the magazine, mother putting ointment on the pet turkey. She considers them terribly dull and quaint, leading a life she could not tolerate yet which she may even be living back home in Wyoming. What other stylistic devices do you see that are admirable?

8. South Africa is filled with contradictions. Pg. 243 “And the ground on either side of it heaved a sigh of teasing, fertile, red earth. This earth hosted rich groves of fruit trees, avenues of pine and eucalyptus, rolling cattle range. And it also cultivated the intense jealousy and bitterness of the land-starved, power-starved, food-starved villagers in the north who had fought violently for this very land and who now, twenty-three years after independence, had suddenly been given it by a rogue government that, having drowned the economy in a stagnant pool of corruption, was in need of their support. It was a bittersweet victory-too late and too poisoned by bad politics to be an unequivocal prize.” Nature is not kind nor fair. To what extent is there a carryover on judgement towards the inhabitants of the land?

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