Mating

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Owing to Rush’s sometimes claustrophobic first-person narration, he is entirely refracted through her mind.

Bruns subsequently commits suicide, in the watering trough outside the home of his principal Boer antagonist, in an act of moral defiance.Bruns” anchored Rush’s 1986 collection, Whites, which featured six stories set in Botswana and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Nelson Denoon, intellectual ideologue and founder of Tsau, an experimental women-only utopia in the Kalahari, has all the hallmarks of the thinking woman's crumpet. He’s a luminary in anthropology who reviles academia, a figure who has managed the elusive feat of putting theory into practice, a man at the level of “Paulo Freire or Ivan Illich, but nonreligious, totally, therefore not dismissable as a mystic. The novel ends with her back in America, benefiting from her time and experience with Doonan, but seemingly relieved that she escaped the life they would have had together. 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.

Maybe that's the point—we are talking narcissism—but despite the work that went into her, we can't take her to heart.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. I say nominally because, eight years after founding the village, Denoon can't bring himself to relinquish control. Along with Infinite Jest and Middlemarch, one of the few books I've read that are so impossibly intelligent they seem written by a higher life form.

This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want. Power, powerless, white black man woman city farmer, lack of water underlying all attempts at societal change. Before they left Gaborone in 1983, Rush finished a short story, “Bruns,” that would soon appear in the New Yorker. The story is narrated by his unnamed protégé and sexual partner, who has abandoned her doctoral studies in favour of a better project: to 'evaginate' Denoon while reforming the imperfect parts of him. 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.And even worse, it's hard to read, because the paper is blinding white and the contrast of the text is very low (the text is more grey than black).

What ensues is both a quest and an exuberant comedy of manners, a book that explores the deepest canyons of eros even as it asks large questions about the good society, the geopolitics of poverty, and the baffling mystery of what men and women really want. 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.brilliant and often hilarious; 500 pages packed with fascinating insights and ideas and jokes and facts and stories. Rush's novel is a fairly unrelenting slog - 477 pages of text rarely broken by paragraphing, let alone by the sweet relief of dialogue - narrated by an unlikeable and frankly unreliable woman who meets a guy she doesn't even really seem to like at a party and then stalks him across a desert because she has absolutely nothing better to do with her life.