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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller. Random House: 2003 (paperback). ISBN: 0375758992. 288 pages.
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About the Author
A page of detailed biographical information on Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, including excerpts from interviews
in which Fuller interprets her own work.
Fuller reveals her understanding of herself as an African: "I was not one of the old, picnic-on-the-lawn empire builders but yet I was not a black African. I was an African born of a different culture and a different tongue, but an African nonetheless."
Character Tree
A list of major characters and their dominant characteristics and values, showing characters’ relationships
to each other.
We list characters from Bobo's small world - her family and the black Africans around them - and from the larger polical world of Africa - its rulers, by democracy and otherwise.
Streams of Themes
A breakdown of potential major discussion themes in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, including ways these themes are
interconnected.
Fuller's memoir invites us to discuss subjects like family and home and race and equally interesting but less visceral topics like the way place names are ever-changing in the third world.
All in the Family
A synopsis of the literary traditions and genres with which Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight is affiliated and a brief
explanation of these connections, giving your book group the opportunity to understand Fuller’s novel in a larger literary
perspective.
In this section, we invite you to think about some of the reading conundrums that are specific to memoir, and we trace some of the (black and white) history of African literature.
Talk Back to the Critics
Excerpts of some major critical reviews of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight from authoritative journals,
newspapers, and magazines. We encourage your book group to enjoy the opportunity to argue with expert opinion.
You can decide if you agree with the critic who argues, "A novelist might have invented great emblematic fates for all of Fuller's family, but as a memoirist she's stuck with what really happened, which is interesting but not always dramatic in the right places."
Doorways to Discussion
A chronologically and thematically organized list of discussion questions, which function to
explore, in a logical and thoughtful manner, the questions and possibilities that Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight evokes.
One of the biggest questions in this section has to do with guilt: Fuller's personal guilt, her family's guilt, and the guilt of colonizers of "the dark continent."
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