Mating

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Even as I watched she reached into one for yet another Kleenex, which she passed across her nostrils before adding it to the orb she was creating. Here was a genuinely goodlooking man, alas … fullface he looked more Slavic than Cherokee now … serious men are my type.

He endures his confinement with a passivity that enrages and puzzles her: this man who can rattle on for hours about the entire history of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism is rendered docile by a few dozen malcontents on his doorstep. 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. I do love our unnamed narrator, uncomfortably, the way one loves a friend who grows tedious gushing about her new love. All the discussion of this novel about the author as a man writing from a women’s point of view: I think an author should be able to stretch in this manner, and that was not a problem for me.I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert. God bless Norman Rush for writing this book: a sincerely delightful, ingenious story brimming with ideas and wit and then, slowly taking shape, heart.

He was the recipient of the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating. Socialism, he declares, is like “knitting with oars” and adds: “show me a socialist country and I will show you a net food importer. What follows, over nearly five hundred pages, is a multilayered dialogue between political utopianism and private perfection. She was less than twenty-five and had a very cute figure, which she tailored her nurse costume to explot.Initially enigmatic, these passages can, when read again (perhaps aided by Wikipedia), have a satisfying density. 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. Her workload at Tsau will include teaching English, skinning rabbits, capturing deadly snakes and removing night soil from the privies. She speaks of her humble beginnings and I was left wondering if her verbosity was less than authentic.

On British imperialism: “By 1898 Japan was the only Pacific country the British had failed to force the opium trade on. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert. From my own experience, when I encounter such combative, talkative people, my tendency is to quickly run in the other direction.So, it's 1980 and we're in Gaborone, capital city Botswana, where the unnamed narrator mulls over the many causes why Africa has disappointed her. First, a confession: I read it after spending a semester in a West African nation studying that nebulous concept of "international development. All through the 1960s and 1970s, Rush, who was born in San Francisco in 1933, had written experimental fiction with negligible success. 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.