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Title: Mating : A Novel by Norman Rush ISBN: 0-679-73709-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.66 (58 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: My favorite book
Comment: "Mating" still stands, years after I first read it (I then read it again), as my favorite book. Although I almost feel like I should apologize for liking it so much, because it could certainly be interpreted by many as overly pompous. Maybe as a grad student I identified with female character (who has no name) who has really struggled in every sense of the word to get to where she is, and without a doubt Nelson Denoon would be my ideal partner, quirks and all! How refreshing to see an academic who goes beyond mere theory. I saw Norman Rush reading from the novel, and I said that I was halfway through the book before I realized that the woman had no name, and I asked why that was. He replied that he himself was halfway through writing the book when he realized that she had no name (!) and decided to leave it that way because otherwise people make a lot of character associations based on a name. The part of the book that has stayed with me the longest is when Nelson reflects on when he was a child, and he had "peak experiences," thinking that these were just the first of a life time of such events, not realizing that they would be few and far between. That insight has actually helped me to be more aware of my own "peaks," even as they happen.
Rating: 5
Summary: love, academia, and africa; fun, serious, and satirical.
Comment: Many of the reviews of this book here objected to the fact that the narrator is, well, self-important, verbose, presumptuous, and pretentious. While she may be all of these things, she is a very consistent and believable character, a budding academic trying to understand (and yes, label) the world in her hyper-intellectual way as she moves up from the working class. Anyone who has spent time on a college campus knows the type, and you either enjoy them or you don't. I found her very attractive and fun, though not someone I would ever want to become involved with, at least seriously.
Through this overly analytic character, we are introduced to life in a exotic backwater, Botswana, where she is trying to advance her stalled dissertation as well as find some romance. I found entry into that world fascinating and enticing, something that I will now never do though may have wanted to in the past. The plot centers on her entry into an experimental community that a brilliant (white) man helped to create and is managing, where women have a larger role than is usual in African societies and where decisions are discussed in a democratic way. While I have no idea if it is based on a real experience, it really has a lot of insight to offer into life in under-developed Africa. As superficial as it sounds, it helped me to imagine what was going on in the minds of many in villages I visited in S Africa on a recent project. I wanted to learn more, which is one of my tests for a good reading experience.
The portrait of this community is very dense, subtle, and multi-layered, as much a critique of development specialists and the bubble they live in as a satirical look at professional intellectuals: the authors are poking fun at her and at academia, rather than espousing her views and recondite perceptions. Yes, there is a nerdy twit inside the narrator as well (and she is aware of it and revels in it, too). I found this very funny and laughed a lot as I read it. Robertson Davies does very similar things and the reader is not supposed to take what he says at face value; what the author writes in not necessarily his point of view.
The love story at the center is also very moving, at least for me, if again over analyzed and verbalized to excess. It describes in wonderful detail the euphoria of the discovery of someone to love, in this case a younger woman with an older man. Again, I enjoyed it immensely and found it realistic: we have all been there (hopefully) and it is played out with wonderfully quirky characters. As the cover said, it is about love at its apogee. This is the only area in which I thought the author was not constantly poking fun. It is beautiful.
So I would warmly recommend this book, but it is a question of taste.
Rating: 4
Summary: When Porcupines Mate
Comment: Mating is a chronicle of one woman's fascinating experiences in Botswana circa 1980 and centers on her love affair with the archetypal man-of-action, Nelson Denoon, an academic superstar who has developed from scratch a remote, self-sustaining village inhabited and administered by dispossessed African women. The narrator, whose name we never learn, is an erudite anthropology MA of 32 who is struggling over her thesis and what occupation to pursue in life. After learning about Denoon's secret village she risks great peril in crossing the desert in order to cling to him and become his Boswell. She is not near so much interested in this unique and interesting village, or love, as she is in the spectacle of Denoon himself. Rush gives an impressive portrait of both Denoon and the woman in this novel. It is truly an accomplishment in itself that Rush narrates in the first person as this thoroughly convincing woman. There is also a gripping story being told here that makes this novel much more than the erudite account of two big brains in Africa that it primarily is. The splendid prose is lucid and filled with uncommon and exotic words and foreign expressions, used not at all pretentiously or superfluously.
The prose carries the novel and the story makes it worth the trip, but there is a lot to the charge that it is too self-conscious in a way that would make even Proust turn in his grave. Nothing about the woman's life is kept from us and we are bombarded with painful, obsessive over-analysis of ever aspect of life, even the most minute and seemingly trivial things. Everything in the world, every comment, every movement, is put under the microscopic lens of her academicians eye. Since she is an expert on everything, from psychology to political science, the reader is flooded with theory, often interesting, but often banal and misplaced. Rush may be putting her and Denoon's self-consciousness up to parody, if not the theories themselves, but the problem is I think he wants it both ways, and this cannot be to the novel's credit. Reading Proust, there is no mistaking that we are seeing into the author's mind's eye; reading Rush, we have an uneasy feeling that the joke is on us.
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Title: Whites by Norman Rush ISBN: 0679738169 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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