Mating

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So, ok, read it with the your Larousse and your OED (which should also serve for the Latin) at your side. The fate of Tsau and the narrator’s courtship with Nelson Denoon: these are the rails along which Mating’s narrative moves.

Pellucidar sounds like the way Tsau felt to me in one respect: it was like being, for the first time in my existence, in a correctly lighted place. 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. He has “projects within projects yielding other projects,” the latest of which, she laments, is an “ostrich ranching mania. Norman Rush is the author of four works of fiction: Whites , a collection of stories, and three novels, Subtle Bodies, Mating, and Mortals.Nar is the kind of person who thrives on verbal sparring to establish her intellectual and personal superiority. From bedroom politics to the exploitation of the developing world by the west, a chaos of misunderstanding is revealed. About a third of the way I began to wonder if I hadn't stumbled across some sort of post-Nabokovian masterpiece.

Planes that would be unattainable with lesser men, men not committed on a *societal* level to the ascent of women. I don’t know why I was so butch with her, but she elicited it, and she also seemed to respond to it. Bruns subsequently commits suicide, in the watering trough outside the home of his principal Boer antagonist, in an act of moral defiance. When Mating begins, in Gaborone in fall 1980, her doctoral thesis has imploded and she is haunted by Bruns’s suicide. This is obviously Rush's feminist archetype, but she's so willing to sacrifice her own academic career, her own morals, her own life even, that it's hard to see her as a whole, authentic person.But somehow, Norman Rush manages to make her and her narration into a stunning reflection and examination of intellectual and romantic life.