Discoveries

Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier

Alexandra Fuller

Penguin: 256 pp., $24.95

“You can’t rewind war,” writes Alexandra Fuller. “It spools on and on and on.” The author of “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” a memoir of growing up with her extraordinary parents in Rhodesia in the war-torn ‘70s, is one of the 10 best writers of the last decade. She crackles (“I sometimes forget to be astonished by Africans”); she chortles over details of African life like “hairy green tinsel” meant to indicate the approach of Christmas; she’s cynical; and above all she’s an African storyteller. In her tales, chickens die of disgust. Home to eastern Zambia for Christmas one year, Bobo (Fuller’s nickname) meets “K,” a former Rhodesian soldier now living alone on a banana farm. Several trips later, she convinces him to travel to Mozambique with her, tell his stories and revisit friends and places from a past he’s been trying to forget. “He looked cathedral,” she writes of their first meeting. In the end, the mountain of sorrow he carries inside cannot be eroded. One of the many casual words for killing used by soldiers in Rhodesia was “scribbling.” Telling K’s story is a brave experiment, but in the end Fuller realizes that “the war hadn’t created K. K was what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority ... and then gave him a gun and sent him to war.”

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The Gardens of Emily Dickinson

Judith Farr with Louise Carter

Harvard University Press:

352 pp., $26.95

THIS is a beautiful book on heavy white paper with rich reproductions of Emily Dickinson’s favorite flowers, including sheets from the herbarium she kept as a young girl. But which came first, the flowers or the poems? So intertwined are Dickinson’s verses with her life in flowers that they seem to be the lens through which she saw the world. In her day (1830-86), many people spoke “the language of flowers.” Judith Farr shows how closely the poet linked certain flowers with her few and beloved friends: jasmine with editor Samuel Bowles, Crown Imperial with Susan Gilbert, heliotrope with Judge Otis Lord and day lilies with her image of herself. The Belle of Amherst, Mass., spent most of her life on 14 acres behind her father’s house on Main Street. Her gardens were full of scented flowers and blossoming trees. She sent notes with nosegays and bouquets to neighbors instead of appearing in the flesh. Flowers were her messengers. Resisting digressions into the world of Dickinson scholarship, Farr stays true to her purpose, even offering a guide to the flowers the poet grew and how to replicate her gardens.

*

How I Grew: A Memoir of the Early Years

Mary McCarthy

Harcourt: 278 pp., $15 paper

“My laughter is a victory over circumstances, and insofar as it betokens a disinterested enjoyment I imagine it to be a kind of pardon,” explains Mary McCarthy in this new edition of her 1986 memoir. “I had the choice of forgiving those incredible relatives of mine ... or pitying myself on their account. Laughter is the great antidote for self-pity.... Yet probably it does tend to dry one’s feelings out a little, as if by exposing them to a vigorous wind.” McCarthy writes like a house afire, always did. These early years from junior high school through Vassar show her intellect being trained to appreciate not just the refined but the popular: journalists, manifestos, jokes. She writes about what she couldn’t bear to read almost as much as what she did read. Norse myths, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman and magazines like the Century and the Virginia Quarterly gave her pleasure, but she could not sink teeth or wit into Dumas, Kipling and other authors she had to read in her convent school years. During a year of public high school she became aware of a universe of intellectuals and their connections to the working world. Then there was the loss of her virginity to Forrest Crosby, 12 years her senior. “I was born as a mind during 1925, my bodily birth having taken place in 1912,” she writes. Born as a mind, like a comet, a planet unto herself, she became beautiful and bright.