Customer Reviews

Mating

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I took forever deciding whether I should read Mating, whether I wanted to commit my time to such a long and apparently difficult book, whether it would be worth it in the end. I thought about buying it a number of times, but couldn't get up the courage -- what if it just gathered dust on a shelf? I borrowed a copy from the library, finally, and promised myself that if I hated it (as a number of my friends had) I would abandon it quickly.

Now Mating is one of the few books I would want to have with me on a desert island. I can easily, happily say it was one of the great reading experiences of my life so far. But it's also a book that seems tailor-made to my sensibilities, as if somebody asked me, "What would you like a big novel to contain?" and then set out to write it.

There's a compelling narrative voice. There's tremendous erudition, so I felt like I learned something about the world on every page. There's a careful attention to language, and yet the language is free and full to bursting. There's all sorts of talk about politics, the history of leftist political movements (particularly anarcho-syndicalism, my own favorite), and utopia. There's a love story, but it's written about without mushy romantic spewings. There's an exotic locale. I'm a happy reader!

But you won't like this book if you're looking for a standard storyline and if you don't have patience for intellectual dialogues scattered throughout the action and if you want clean and unambiguous answers to everything. You also won't like it if you demand that first person narrators be always appealing. I found the narrator often annoying, but in the end was quite glad to have known her.

To have known her -- yes, by the end you speak of the narrator and her obsession and love, Nelson Denoon, as people you have known. (Or perhaps I shouldn't use the second-person here, since I know people who do not agree with me, who found the characters simply exasperating. So let me rephrase: I felt like I had known them.)

If you're fairly well-read, you can test whether you're going to find this book stunning or frustrating by playing a cross-referencing mindgame of this sort: Imagine that James Joyce finished Ulysses and was annoyed that his writing hadn't tackled all of the problems of human civilizations. Just then, a time warp appeared, and Paulo Freire and Emma Goldman stepped out and lectured Joyce for 40 days and 40 nights. He was thrilled. He began to write and discovered that a small part of his talent had been taken over by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and another part by Don DeLillo. Ben Okri had found his way in there somewhere, too. Writing was hard with all those different voices pulling at him, but he got through, and the book he produced was Mating.

If the names above are unfamiliar to you, then ask yourself how you felt while reading it. If you made it through to this paragraph, and you're not mad at me for inserting the above (in fact, you found it piqued your curiosity), then you'll do just fine with Mating, and you may be deeply grateful, as I am, that Norman Rush had the courage and genius to write it.

Although it won the 1991 National Book Award and was recipient of many glowing reviews, Norman Rush's novel Mating left me scratching my head and wondering, "what am I missing?" Written in the first person, Rush's novel tells of the somewhat predatory courtship between a single anthropologist woman and Nelson, the charismatic founder of a seemingly utopian community for African woman desert Botswana. The writing of this novel is consistently literate and intelligent; I found myself regularly turning to the dictionary (or wishing the dictionary was nearby) as the erudition of Rush's narrator poured forth. Nonetheless, the book as a whole, although containing many fine parts and much excellent writing, did not hold my interest. I think, in essence, that, while well-drawn and convincing characters, the two lovers did not appeal to me. I simply did not like them, and did not enjoy their company. Given the favorable press and awards this novel has received, however, many readers must love this book . I hope other readers have a more favorable reaction.

I understand people's irritation with certain passages in this book--there's no doubt that some of it is indulgent, even bloated--but I'm baffled by their complete inability to find the accompanying humor. Not to mention how they conflate the main character with the author. It's the character who is snobbish, judgmental, overly self-aware, difficult--and also funny! This book is a delight for the way it captures the very strange turnings of the mind. Abandon hope all ye who enter here for adventure! The action is minimal, although the author does wonderfully recreate the political and social milieu of Botswana. It's really a book about love and manners, a comedy about the absurd lengths to which we go to feed our obsessions with other people. Many critics have compared Mating to the work of Jane Austen. Norman Rush does indeed relentlessly understand, as did Jane Austen, the madness and delight of human relationships--and he dissects it for 500 pages. Now you know what you are truly getting for your money. Enjoy!

A wide-ranging, cultivated mind is on display in these pages, but the operative phrase is 'on display.' The book reads like a series of intellectual vignettes-- from the authorship of Shakespeare's plays to the politics of the ANC-- all strung on a thin, frayed thread of story. Every time Rush wanders-- unwittingly-- within hailing distance of a dramatic moment, he unfailingly blows it by larding on more gab. The comparison to Jane Austen could not be more inappropriate-- she always philosophizes in the service of her story; for Rush, the story is a pretext for trotting out another interesting, marginally relevant tidbit from his apparently vast card file of 3X5s. That the powers that be at amazon.com consider this one of the best novels of the 90s does not bode well for the rest of their list

The author of "Mating" does a good job. The plot is basically good -- a comedy-of-manners/battle-of-the-sexes set in a utopian development project in Botswana. The descriptions of Botswana and its people (especially the female American doctoral student who is the narrator, the internationally famous economic development expert she falls in love with, and other members of the ex-pat community in Africa) are three-dimensional and well-drawn. Most reviewers of "Mating" mention its erudition and intellectual qualities. My problem is that there's just too much of it. I would have enjoyed the book much more if it had been about a hundred pages shorter; as it is, I ran out of interest about two/thirds before the end. I can recommend it mostly to readers who like long books full of long words. Another story of ex-pat love in Africa is told in "Rules of the Wild" by Francesca Marciano.

I owe my return to pleasureable reading to this book. From the first pages I was consumed with reading further, to the distraction of my other responsibilities. Be sure to keep a dictionary nearby, as if a child early in the learning process. In fact, while some might find the book to be distant because of the vocabulary, I found the challenge rewarding and insightful into the overly analytical mind of the narrator. Also, having lived in Zimbabwe, I found the descriptions of the region and the geopolitics insightful and frank. I think the depth of thought regarding relationships and the human drive for understanding relationships is timeless, and look forward to reading again at a different point in my life. I truly believe new ideas will capture your mind with each reading. For such a phenomenal book, I still am perplexed, and slightly disappointed with the ending which seemed hurriedly pieced together and concluded. For the serious reader, especially coming out of a long-term relationship or having recently been overseas, this book will keep you entranced.

My second reading of Mating left me exhilarated, much like the first. This remains one of my favorite books of all time. One of the reasons is the author's love of language: not only does he know how to capture nuances in feeling and intellectual discourse; he knows that language is what distinguishes human from animal mating. The author loves to make up word endings, or new usages, and this is as thrilling as any other discovery, and this book is full of them, including the reader's realization that the author's abandoned thesis is re-written as nothing less than a study of Denoon, or the intellectuall male as viewed by the equally intellectually precocious female anthropologist. Margaret Mead meets Margaret Atwood. After a while, i just put away the dictionary and plunged on. The book is rewarding. I recommend it, with the caveat that parts of the journey are difficult, but ultimately well worth taking. Pourquoi pas?

This is a difficult book that will send you scrambling for the dictionary more than once. It will also test your intellectual self-confidence, since much of the book unfolds in the form of extended conversations between our protagonists about art, history, literature -- each so erudite one wonders whether Mr. Rush had to research them all before he wrote them. That said, I think for people interested in what it means to love someone's mind, and in how intellectuals can lose their moorings in affairs of the heart -- this a great book, though not for people who want an easy read.

"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.

Mating showed me and other peripatetic readers that we have a travelling companion who has been there, too. The travels are both geographic and interior; and like the heroine in Tsau, we have all been strangers in a strange land. What a joy and relief to laugh aloud at travails of body and spirit, much as we did in the Peace Corps, approaching problems of romance and society with both intelligence and wit, because the problems were often too large, too universal, and not demanding of a solution. Would we do it again- definitely. Would we revisit Mating again- undoubtedly. Imagine a life among IMPORTANT issues, at an IMPORTANT time, and processing that life and those issues with intelligence, wit, irony, and the realization that nothing has an ending...you don't need to imagine much farther than MATING. Thank you, Mr. Rush; you, too, know that we are not alone, we citizens of the world and of the heart, and isn't it a hoot?