I got this book from the library because I had just finished The Last Resort and wanted to read more of Rhodesia / Zimbabwe. In this book, Alexandra meets a former Rhodesian soldier, an extremely capable, charismatic man, who is living on his own farm near her parents' home in Zambia.
She is coy or perhaps sincere and only calls him K. She persuades him to travel with her into Zimbabwe. I think she was bored and wished to write another best-seller. Perhaps this isn't fair or true, and it certainly is not kind. I don't know, but this book pissed me off. Alexandra seemed to be bored living in Wyoming with her family (including 2 small children) and flocks arounds with K. She writes well though, and there are many vignettes of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia, mixed in with the war history. K half falls in love with her, and there is certainly a sexual tension between them. Ostensibly, she wants to get more understanding of that time by having K tell her his demons, by having him tell her what he did during the war, by bringing her to meet other half-crazed war veterans.
Along the way, it is a sort of travelogue with descriptions and black and white photos of the landscape and people they meet.
Road sign in Zambia: "Speed kills! Condoms SAVE." She uses a lot of the vernacular in her narrative and "scribbling" means killing.
K is trying desperately to find peace and has become religious. He has a head full of bad memories, including the death of his small son. And he surely is not going to find peace hanging around with Alexandra Fuller.
It seems she could have written about her Africa without adding pain to a man already soaked with anguish. She says she thought "he held shards of truth" but I don't think she thought that at all. She just got restless and stirred things up.
However, a book like this does throw some light on modern Africa and can be read for that reason, I suppose. Ultimately, I felt K had enough posttraumatic stress and didn't need to be dragged through it again.
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