Mating

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She speaks of her humble beginnings and I was left wondering if her verbosity was less than authentic. This part gets into philosophy, such as that of the Tao Te Ching, and transformations caused by near-death experiences. Bruns subsequently commits suicide, in the watering trough outside the home of his principal Boer antagonist, in an act of moral defiance. Rush's Mating is like those first vegetarian meals from the 1970s; overly chewy, with lots of bulk, weird, crunchy things, and in the end, difficult to swallow.

brilliant and often hilarious; 500 pages packed with fascinating insights and ideas and jokes and facts and stories. For the reader of Mating, love and politics, intimacy and justice, are held in perfect equipoise; the pitfalls and possibilities of both are precisely—and thrillingly—explored to their limits. Rather than trying to politicize his readers, Rush assumes we are as curious as he is about southern African realpolitik circa 1980, and the ideological combustions that accompanied it.In the spirit of saying everything,” she informs us, “at first I had to deal with feelings that a smaller penis would have been more relaxing for me.

Somewhat predictably, the shining edifice of Tsau begins to crumble and Denoon, illuminated by a newly found inner light, wafts around in white and descends into a state of abnegation. Other reviews have made much of the narrator's supersized vocabulary, which is certainly fun, but I think the true intelligence of this book probably lies in its allusiveness. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari--one in which he is virtually the only man. Literally--I finally just started keeping a list of the words I didn't know, because cracking the dictionary every time got to be chore.

Initially enigmatic, these passages can, when read again (perhaps aided by Wikipedia), have a satisfying density. I realized that her safari coatlet was in fact perfect for her situation because of its accordion pockets. I've read a lot, but retain little, because while so many of the critics of this book want something that sticks close to "reality," I find the best books are the ones that invent something totally unusual with characters compelling in their flaws and their virtues. 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.

The protracted monologue of a 32-year-old Stanford University anthropologist who is adrift and loveless in Botswana at the dawn of the Reagan era, Mating was published by Knopf in 1991 and went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. Ergo: “And not to venture too far into the underside of our household humor, he also laughed inordinately when I was getting into bed and slightly farted and he said Is that the way you greet me? So, ok, read it with the your Larousse and your OED (which should also serve for the Latin) at your side. She adds her “own emendation, a less pessimistic one”—the “jagged and belated but definite rise of women into positions of political authority.My three stars are awarded for the regular chuckles I got from the book, and for the depiction of some truly toe-curling characters. Before they left Gaborone in 1983, Rush finished a short story, “Bruns,” that would soon appear in the New Yorker. Exploring diametrical opposites on a personal, political and global scale, Rush's 1991 novel highlights the disjunction between ideals and realities. It's been years since I first read Mating and am just starting it again (which i almost never do) because I loved it so much that I want to go back for another visit with these amazing characters. Ah, Nar, when you look at the world and other people as one unending competition, your horizons can flatten out quickly.