Mating

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One becomes the narrator, an anthropologist in Botswana, as she pursues a relationship with an enigmatic man in an admittedly somewhat implausible matriarchal community. For a novelist, Rush has an unusual fascination with history, power struggles and left-wing ideology; he once remarked to Granta that “Spanish anarchism,” eradicated by Franco, was “the best lost cause.

What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of manners: "A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously. And important secondary characters in Tsau, even given the narrator's focus on Denoon and her own self-absorption, are sketchily drawn," Shepard nonetheless extols Rush's "vigorous and luminous prose. Like Ulysses, Mating is a delicate rendering of an intimate relationship between two adults, and it imparts an earthy Joycean humor.A first person narrative about a young failing female anthropologist falling in love with an older American man who has founded an egalitarian feminist commune in the heart of Southern Africa is just too cutely exotic, too cheaply high concept to work. She endures hallucinations, splinters, ill-fitting sunglasses and constipation; she encounters lions, ostriches, dead weaverbird nests and vultures. brilliant and often hilarious; 500 pages packed with fascinating insights and ideas and jokes and facts and stories. An extraordinary novel, Mating lives at the intersection of American seeking, European utopian philosophy and African culture, a book reflecting the author's experience as a Peace Corps worker in Botswana from 1978 to 1983.

And I entertain myself by coming up with subtitles for the book: Love Makes Smart People Stupid, He Just Isn't Into Remaking Himself for You the Way You Just Did for Him, Allegedly Great Men and the Women Who Love Them, and Why You Shouldn't Get into Relationships with Anthropologists.And drawing Nelson into debates on anthropology just might be considered baiting since you told him your area of specialty wasn't anthropology but ornithology. But then came the story's denouement, in which the narrator's total supplication and abasement seemed so grossly out-of-character that I wanted to throw the book across the room (I would have too, except I finished it on an airplane where this wasn't really an option). Even as race is a subtextual theme throughout the book (2 white anthropologists figuring it out in the middle of an African village, duh), Mating doesn't get into ideas around race much.

Denoon intrigues her, and she wants to get to know him intimately, so she treks solo across the Kalahari Desert to reach Tsau, where she hopes to be welcomed. 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.

I especially enjoyed the culture clash between the limey-hating Denoon and the wandering British actors who turn up in Tsau to perform Shakespeare. a big potted arboricola near the door”): a flowering plant native to Taiwan, better known by its common name, the Dwarf Umbrella Tree. Just then I was trying to see the relationship between Nelson's cynical observation that the meaning of life in every formulation seemed to reduce to finding or inventing a perfect will to be subject to, the relationship of that to scanting remarks about la femme moyenne sensuelle--which we agreed I was not, of course--finding her raison d'etre in the love of a male as close to alpha as she can get. 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.

Joy - There are times when our female anthropologist surprises herself on all the positive feelings her life contains. A woman who notices a great deal, she observes that “Denoon was thicker through the neck and middle than he needed to be. 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.Here’s a man who keeps track of the statistics on dowry bride murders in India and “becomes palpably depressed by a split in some Spanish labor union. Nevertheless, the women-run village in Botswana that he establishes in an interesting setting and suggests connections between personal relationships and foreign development of Africa.