Mating

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

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Description

An American anthropologist is at a loose end in Botswana. She is ferociously intelligent and wonderfully inquisitive. She is also in love with Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who runs an experimental women-only utopian village in the Kalahari. 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'

Reviews

One of the most hypnotic reading experiences I've ever had... every feminist would be proud to claim this extraordinary novel as her own -- Margaret Forster * Sunday Telegraph *
[A] striking success * Guardian *
Dizzyingly readable... has that feeling, rare and unforgettable in contemporary fiction, of everything being at stake - ethically, emotionally and imaginatively... The best novel published this year, and doubtless for some to come * Independent *
A comedy of manners crackling with ideas: about feminism, commitment, politics, Africa and the West. Rush brilliantly sustains the voice of his central character... and makes the post-colonial city and the new community itself familiar and concrete * Observer *
Exhilarating... vigorous and luminous. Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee * New York Times *
[A] politically astute epic... [with] hypnotic prose... Essential reading -- Max Lui * Independent *
An extremely sophisticated dramatic monologue... a serious romance refracted comically through the mind of a startlingly individual narrator... Rush has ingenuity to burn * New Republic *
Funny, unflinching, and shockingly honest * New Yorker *
The best rendering of erotic politics since D.H. Lawrence... a marvellous novel * New York Review of Books *
Thick with meditations on matters scholarly and literary, political and psychological... [The narrator's] introspection and argumentation are infused with a contagious joie de vivre... Delightful [and] compelling * The Millions *
In the pyrotechnics that erupt on the page, in its fecundity of ideas, Mating has much in common with the writing of Garca Mrquez, Vargas Llosa, and John Fowles... A dazzling original * The Philadelphia Inquirer *
How can Norman Rush's 1991 Mating rank among the great 20th-century novels Let me count the ways. With all respect to Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, no modern male has imagined a female protagonist as vivid and complex as Mating's unnamed lover-anthropologist-adventurer. Few if any white novelists have written so easily about the underrepresented turf of Africa -- Robert Christgau
An audaciously clever novel with substance as well as flash * Detroit Free Press *
A complex and moving love story... breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brio * Chicago Tribune *
Witty, raunchy... prodigiously aspiring... wonderfully varied and pungent... a remarkable book * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
Even readers who remember the luminous stories in Rush's debut, Whites, may not be prepared for the cleverness, humor, insight into human nature and intellectual acuity demonstrated in this accomplished novel * Publisher's Weekly *
Brilliantly written... utterly sui generis... Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion * Mirabella *
A novel of real, original ideas about feminism, love, politics, race and anthropology... This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across * Independent five star review *
[It] has a playful humour... The quirkily acquisitive heroine stands out -- Anna Scott * Guardian *

Author Bio

Norman Rush is the author of Whites, Mating and Mortals. Granta will publish his new novel Subtle Bodies in October 2013. He worked in the peace corps in Botswana and now lives in upstate New York.