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. 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. 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. When the cabal’s ringleader vanishes, Denoon is accused of killing him and hiding the body in the desert.

From bedroom politics to the exploitation of the developing world by the west, a chaos of misunderstanding is revealed. In an interview with Norman Rush and his wife Elsa for the Paris Review, Joshua Pashman describes Rush's first novel as "Both an adventure story and a 'novel of ideas,' Mating is also a microscopic, Lawrentian examination of an embattled courtship. Thank god the shrimp tree is empty, I thought, because it looked as though she might collapse into it. I perhaps wouldn't go that far as this is not an intergenerational story or terribly complex but I see the parallels and am happy that I read it. Phipps said he was wondering “why everyone isn’t always talking about this book, why we have not raised great statues of Rush and/or the unnamed protagonist in our parks and squares.Here was a genuinely goodlooking man, alas … fullface he looked more Slavic than Cherokee now … serious men are my type.

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). But what ultimately stands out is a quirkily acquisitive heroine compulsively collecting 'new material to be integrated into the study of me.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.

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. At times wildly comic but also magnificently cerebral, Mating is a profound exploration of the human condition and a moving love story, circling the question ‘what do men and women really want? What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of manners: "A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously. Rush creates a unique protagonist, a grad student with photographic memory and love of archaic vocabulary, who can think of almost nothing other than the famous academic she goes to extreme lengths to ensnare. I know it sounds absurd, but I wanted to create the most fully realized female character in the English language.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. Throughout Nar's odyssey in Tasu I kept wondering if she is the type of woman who wants a man or who needs a man. A companion thought throughout the book is What am I to do with this male author's female protagonist's documentation of her charismatic male love?