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Customer Reviews
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.
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.
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