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Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa
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Product Description
With honesty and compassion, Kann pieces together her sister's life, explores the heartbreak of loss and the struggle to belong, and finally discovers a new, more complicated meaning of home.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #279695 in Books
- Published on: 2007-04-17
- Released on: 2007-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780312425722
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When Rhodesia declared independence from Britain in 1965, five-year-old Kann, the daughter of white Africans, would entertain her father's tennis party guests by singing, "Rhodesia has sanctions, and I can't have Marmite on my toast!" In her 20s, Kann left what had become Zimbabwe for the U.S. Drawn back to Africa by the sudden death of one of her sisters (in a 1999 car crash in Zambia), Kann found herself reexamining her earlier life. Her alcoholic mother—"There should be lots of words to describe drunk mothers, like the Inuit have words for snow"—and her morose father had divorced early; the stepmother who raised the girls after their father's suicide was barely able to manage. The country itself had always been in a state of war; as Kann realized when she first met her American husband, "I had never dated a man who hadn't killed someone, or at least been prepared to kill someone." Until recently, writers like Joseph Conrad and Paul Theroux have defined the white colonial experience in literature. Now, with Alexandra Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) and Kann, we're hearing from a different constituency: the daughters. Their tales, Kann's included, make for fascinating reading. Look for PW's upcoming Q&A with Wendy Kann. (May 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Framed by the tragic death of her youngest sister in a car accident in Zambia, Kann's memoir tells the story of her and her sisters' coming-of-age in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, at the twilight of the colonial era. Kann's parents' tumultuous marriage ended when Kann and her two sisters were very young, and because of their mother's drinking and mental instability, their father got custody of them. He soon married the well-intentioned but moody Gail, but it wasn't long before his debts caught up with him, and he committed suicide, leaving Gail with five children to care for. Kann decided to forgo college and drifted from secretarial job to secretarial job before meeting Mickey, an American man, whom she accompanied to New York and married. America is strange to her, but Kann makes it her home and settles in, until news of her sister's death jolts her out of her complacency. Although Kann is at times too circumspect about her feelings and point of view, her memoir vividly evokes life in colonial Africa. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"[Wendy Kann] writes from the perspective of a daughter and a mother, with a twinge of regret but not the gnawing homesickness of other writers cursed and fortunate enough to have been raised on that remarkable continent. The book's refreshingly crisp, uncloying, practical tone makes you feel empathy for a woman who lost her sister in a faraway land."--Los Angeles Times
"Kann's debut is brave, brutally honest, and highly readable. Her prose is poignant and elegant; it especially comes alive when she is describing the land and the people of Africa."--Library Journal
"I was very affected by this accomplished memoir. Wendy Kann, with often heart-breaking and evocative detail, has brought back a small gem from her colonial experience of Africa."--Carolyn Slaughter, author of A Black Englishman and Before The Knife: Memories of an African Childhood
"Kann writes brilliantly about sisters: their frictions, their intimacies, and, above all, their binding loyalty, even when time has moved them continents apart. Her memoir takes us on an emotional helter-skelter, from the entitlement and raw racism of her African childhood, through troughs of poverty and abandonment, to an ascendant understanding of what means to live and love. Reads like a sequel to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Doris Lessing's memoirs."--Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin and author of Dreambirds
Customer Reviews
A tragic, yet fascinating personal account
When Lauren is killed, Wendy's past comes to stalk her like a jungle animal. She and Lauren and their sister Sharon grew up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and she realizes that she will have to go back to Africa in order to move forward with her life in America.
The three sisters were raised dysfunctionally, amidst a landscape of madness, terror and war. Their parents were at odds --- their mother a rapidly deteriorating alcoholic, their father increasingly melancholy as events in their adopted home shifted like quicksand. Wendy, the oldest sibling, became a surrogate mother to Sharon and baby Lauren, a role that was forced on her by such incidents as the night Lauren disappeared. "The doorbell rang. I rushed to answer it and found a stranger there holding Lauren, who was blinking her round brown eyes in the soft outside light...My father was still at work. My mother had been in her bedroom all day. 'She belongs here,' I said finally, reaching out to take my little sister."
A divorce eventually occurred and the girls' father remarried. His new wife was capricious and cold and made Wendy's life worse. Her father's eventual accidental death was whispered among the family to be a suicide, and the girls' mother passed away in an institution. Meanwhile in Rhodesia, rumors of war, acts of terror and rumblings of inevitable change became commonplace.
"If you had asked anyone in the bars or clubs who we were fighting, only the most dull-eyed would have snarled, 'Kaffirs.' Some, more sober, might have said 'communism.' No one in my generation recognized that we were fighting to preserve an unsustainable way of life." After the war, there were still servants but they had to be paid more and there were many more locks on many more doors. As the old culture of colonialism died out to be replaced by a new kind of imperialism of the recently oppressed, Wendy made a passive escape by following her boyfriend to Europe and finally to Connecticut where she settled in to a comfortingly safe life raising her children and working as a counselor. Until she got the phone call about Lauren.
Going back for the funeral, Wendy is caught up in the drama of Africa once again. She senses generations of pain that she had not before confronted, in her meeting with Moses, a servant hired by Lauren's husband to keep poachers away. Intrigued, Wendy asks to photograph Moses with his powerful rifle. Moses assents, but "there was nothing coming from his eyes...I stared hard at Moses and recognized powerlessness." Despite the rifle, Moses still fears the white lady and her potential to humiliate and harm.
Lauren had been living in Zambia when her vehicle ran off a lonely road. Her son Luke, who was in the car with her, was just a baby. A major priority for the surviving sisters is arranging schooling and childcare for the boy. Revisiting Luke with Sharon when he is seven, Wendy comes to understand that Luke needs not just childcare now that his mother is gone; he needs a memory of Lauren. Wendy is able to tell him that the accident was "the car's fault" and that his mother loved him.
CASTING WITH A FRAGILE THREAD is written episodically, poetically, by someone who didn't plan to write a book. It is Wendy's gift to Luke, her eulogy to her spirited sister Lauren, and her way of comforting herself for her enduring loss.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
Awe-inspiring
Wendy Kann's personal and political history in "Casting with a fragile thread" is riveting, wise and timeless. It is a gripping memoir about a woman who has risen above her traumatic childhood and turned her pain into compassion and healing.
Born in colonial Rhodesia--now Zimbabwe--Kann grew up during the country's 13-year civil war. She experienced the first elections in Zimbabwe in 1980 and lived in Hong Kong when the British officials handed the city over to the Chinese in 1997. She said both experiences were nagging reminders that the laws, police, media, army and government can bring bewildering uncertainty to a safe, predictable orderly world.
She writes poetically about her environment--how the lawns in America's neighborhoods simply roll trustingly one into the next, without the rude division of fences and gates.
Having spent my early years in South Africa I too had my "mind revolt against the terrifying avalanche of choice" and tried to figure what "American" was and how I could be "just that."
Kann's observation years later about Rhodesia's civil war is a warning to all countries. She said, "No one in my generation recognized that we were fighting a war to preserve an unsustainable way of life."
Her quote reminded me of America. We have the technology for alternative fuel yet we remain in a war in the Middle East because of an addiction to oil, a non-renewable resource.
An incredible journey within the pages of this book
Kann shares her honest emotions so perfectly that I was unable to put the book down. The description of physical terrain and emotional environment are captured with a lovely balance that allows one to truly picture Wendy Kann's life. You will bond with the writer. She has come to us from such an exotic and imperfect world and her story is the discovery of purpose with feelings. This book has the quality, depth and interest to definitely be a top seller. I could imagine it has a fit in Oprah's book club....
