Mating

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So even though the author is a middle-aged man, it is interesting to see his take on what a woman of that place in life would think/do. Midway through this rereading, I am struck not so much by how much richness Rush devotes to developing character (though the characters are indeed fully-wrought, at once ample and supple), but to the mission of the novel itself, which seems to be constructed as carefully and with as much openness as Tsau, the utopian outpost where the two main characters come together.

Z offers the narrator one electrifying nugget: Nelson Denoon, a lapsed 47-year-old American scholar who has established a secretive women-run community, Tsau, in the Kalahari Desert, will soon present himself at a debate in Gaborone.The Virginia Quarterly Review mentions the first-person narrator's "emotional and intellectual entanglement" with her beloved, but concludes with the general, positive statement that "The context of their encounter and of the ensuing relationship plays a significant role in their experience, and is forcefully depicted in the sophisticated, thought-provoking novel. I quite liked the characters and probably would have enjoyed it more so, if I could have fully understood what the hell was going on.

It is a little drawn out in the beginning, recounting several of the protagonist’s relationships in Gabarone, but once she starts her trek across the Kalahari, it is entirely engrossing.That self-knowledge gives rise to Mating’s most radiant sentence: “I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same. Updike declared that Rush, after three books, had exhausted Botswana as a subject, and mused: “I would be happy to see a Stateside sequel, no longer than, say, Candide or The Great Gatsby.

It did feel a little pretentious at times but it taught me words like evaginated, which does not mean what you think it means. Exploring diametrical opposites on a personal, political and global scale, Rush's 1991 novel highlights the disjunction between ideals and realities.Women dominate Tsau’s governing council; they are deeded their plots and homes; and, defying tradition, inheritance is channeled through daughters, not sons. I love the crazed self-analysis about childbearing, and how that suggestion on his part in the end is what makes her leave. First, a confession: I read it after spending a semester in a West African nation studying that nebulous concept of "international development.

Here was a genuinely goodlooking man, alas … fullface he looked more Slavic than Cherokee now … serious men are my type. The reading experience: the first 50-75 pages showed potential, the last 100 pages were decent, the 300 pages in the middle were a slough, just painfully boring.In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative. Knopf editor for Mating, Ann Close, commends Rush's "facility in conveying the voice and sensibility of his amusingly self-absorbed narrator, a feminist anthropologist whose pursuit of a famous social scientist is a timely riff on a perennial theme, What do women want?