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Mating

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Halfway through the journey, one of her two donkeys, Mmo, runs away with her tent, most of her water supply and her toilet kit: “Now I was supposed to present myself to Denoon with only the vaguest notion of how I looked, and uncombed.

He says that the novel "is state-of-the-art artifice: she [the narrator] talks, she introspects, she even suffers. But somehow, Norman Rush manages to make her and her narration into a stunning reflection and examination of intellectual and romantic life. where he had earned a living as an antiquarian bookseller, to Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, to be co-directors of the Peace Corps in that country.Mating” was acclaimed in its time — it won the National Book Award — and is now in its 41st printing, having never gone out of print. As ham-handed as some of the literary opinions of Tsau's architect, Nelson Denoon tend to be (he gets poetry humorously wrong, and his views on Shakespeare seem to miss any literary dimension of the plays), it's hard not to admire his energy and his equal commitment to physical and intellectual tasks, the deltas where these tributaries of sweat come together. On every page, Rush casually name-drops obscure philosophers, touches on long-standing academic debates, and refers to brainy books.

I believe that the author, who spent many years living in Africa as an ex-pat, probably did his share of long distance treks too.He’s supposed to be this brilliant man, a feminist, who is creating a Utopian, matriarchal society and giving impoverished African women agency but this model society is based on Western ideals.

What follows, over nearly five hundred pages, is a multilayered dialogue between political utopianism and private perfection.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.

Women dominate Tsau’s governing council; they are deeded their plots and homes; and, defying tradition, inheritance is channeled through daughters, not sons. Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as Whites in 1986, and for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She criticizes the book for having "too much detailed sociology," but "in the main readers will be captivated by the narrator's quirky, obsessive voice and the situation she describes: a game of amorous relationships complicated by feminist doctrine and an exotic locale. The clash of these utopias contributes to the novel’s dynamism, as well as to its enduring relevance in a period when the positions of liberals continue to face strong challenges from the left.This is the story of a cerebral, overanalyzing woman who doesn’t want the mediocre or the nearly-great and sets her eyes on the one great man that she finds. This is writing that respects our intelligence enough to submerge us in the swirling complexities of Botswana during apartheid: the “thug Mangope,” a real political figure and a toady of the apartheid regime who died in 2018, will reemerge at a crucial juncture in Rush’s narrative. The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. Mating is a requiem for a vanished global left that, in Rush’s estimation, was untainted by Russian-style communism, and at certain moments, in its lower registers, the novel imparts the same melancholy as a composition by Victor Jara, the left-wing Chilean musician tortured and executed by Pinochet’s soldiers in 1973. I recognize that many other readers found this an extremely convincing portrait of womanhood, but as far as I'm concerned the only thing Rush nailed was the level of obsession over an ex-boyfriend that we can occasionally bring to bear, and I'm honestly not sure if that was an intentional theme of the author's or simply a side-effect of this book about a woman being all about a man.

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