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Still bogged down on the elephant hunt.

Did that happen to anyone else?

Yes.

I'm going to have to skip that part, I think.

I "savored" the elephant hunt portion less than some others. I got thru it and gleaned all that went on but I didn't focus as closely on the imagery as in other parts.

A big part of it was how much I hate the thought of killing the elephants. I mean the way they look for as many bucks as possible with as much ivory as possible. It so shameful and wasteful and sad.

And that these people who pay for the safaris have someone else track their prey and carry their weapons and then they just sneak up and shoot the elephant. It was hard to read.

It was interesting that she saw it as somewhat barbaric yet she still did it--business is business so to speak.

I wonder if before she died she saw the devestation done to the elephant population in the sick hunt for ivory.

You get the impression when she's doing it that she seems to think there is an endless supply of elephants. Unless, of course, she didn't think of this at all.

Well, I was thinking the elephant hunt went on for 100 pages, but counted them and it isn't that many. Just feel like I have been crawling through Africa at bug eye level, hunting elephants for the past week.

I don't know what it is, but can hardly make myself read. And I started out not being able to put the book down.

I'm having a really hard time now getting back into this.

Ugh.

It's hard to remind myself that this woman lived in a different time and different country and what the norms were for them aren't for us today.

i'm still reading. Do we have a time limit? That might light a fire underneath me. And don't tell me it's Monday.

Okay, Really Trying, we won't tell you. lol

But we won't start reading the new book until everyone gets it so we still have the rest of the week to discuss this one.

thanks for not telling me.

Okay I finished this book.

I'll reserve my comments until other people are done.

I should be finished this afternoon. Have lots of comments.

I'm anxious to hear the comments of those who have just finished.

Hope it's okay to start the discussion today. One nice thing about this book is there are no spoilers.

Liked the book, but didn’t like the author. I think she was very selfish. Perhaps that is the way one has to be to get where she did. She just wasn’t a likeable character, to me.

Thought her writing was beautiful. Loved how she compared the desert to night:

Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility.

How many times do we look at a problem and night and think, “I'll wait until morning to deal with this.”

Didn’t understand exactly the role of Arab Ruta. Was he her slave or her servant? Why was he called “Arab?”

Also wondered why she was treated more like a boy than a girl. Was her father just not interested? Did he not want to do the job of parenting that a mom would have done? Why wasn’t a “governess type” hired or did I miss that? Would like to know more about her dad. Did love her dad’s advice when she was going to try to be a horse trainer:

Work and hope. But never hope more than you work.

What a great mantra for life!

Didn’t like the chapter in the voice of the horse. Didn’t “get” why she did that. Also didn’t like the idea of hunting elephants. Just a short aside, I recently took a class and elephants were described, like monkeys, animals closest to human beings when it comes to empathy. You certainly saw that when the females pretended to be bulls to protect the bulls.

I really did enjoy reading this book. While I didn’t like the main character in this book, I liked many of her characters. Maybe she just has an easier time describing others (generally men) as opposed to herself. I felt she made Africa a very alive character which I loved.

Did do a little reading about her on the internet. This site is very interesting. http://www.wou.edu/las/socsci/kimjensen/wildepaper.htm She was married a number of times, as well as the other woman, at least once, which was a very accepted practice in Africa. She gave birth to a deformed son who she basically abandoned, as was done to her by her mother. Probably should have done this research before I read the book!

Hope that wasn’t saying to much, but I wanted to get everything out I felt about the book before I forget, since I want to return it to the library on a timely basis.

I did the internet research too during the book and I know it changed my view of her a little bit.

I didn't see the part about her chld; but, I guess it is consistent with what she learned from her mother. You never get the sense that she connects with her mother later in life--maybe she died?

I mentioned earlier the thing about her father having no governess or anyone for her. I thought that was odd too. It really does seem that he raised her as he would have a son. And, in a lot of ways, she responded in kind--her independence and closer association with men than women.

I also saw on the internet that there was some speculation about whether she or one of her lovers actually "wrote" the book. I wondered a little about that when some parts seemed remarkably different than others--for instance, when she does the narrative from the horse.

Maybe she was just experimenting or maybe she had written some journal entries or short stories in the past that she sort of incorporated into this memoir?

I did like the horse narrative but it seemed sort of "shoved in" to the rest of the memoir.

All-in--all I really enjoyed the book. Of course a lot of the practices--elephant hunting and such--were horrifying; but, it was a very different time, I suppose.

I will say that she did seem to appreciate how intelligent the elephants were and yet she still participated in hunting them down. And she even seemed to use their intelligence as a justification for the hunting--saying something about that they seemed to have more of a fighting chance than some other prey do. That thinking seemed rather warped to me.

I didn't find her a particularly likeable character either. I think as NA mentioned earlier she just seems very detached from everything she wrote about. Maybe that was because of the way she was brought up and I guess it would be understandable, but she didn't seem to bring any sort of passion to the events she described and for that reason I found myself not actually caring very much either.