On British imperialism: “By 1898 Japan was the only Pacific country the British had failed to force the opium trade on. And keep your dictionary handy as you'll come across vocabulary worthy of Vladimir Nabokov - several examples: passim, anti-makhoa, cinéphile, douceur, omphalos.

where he had earned a living as an antiquarian bookseller, to Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, to be co-directors of the Peace Corps in that country. It follows our narrator as she travels 100 miles through the Kalahari desert to the community of Tsau.A lot of reviewers, even John Updike back in the day, took issue with his vocabulary usage, but I really liked it. What follows, over nearly five hundred pages, is a multilayered dialogue between political utopianism and private perfection. Like Ulysses, Mating is a delicate rendering of an intimate relationship between two adults, and it imparts an earthy Joycean humor. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

a big potted arboricola near the door”): a flowering plant native to Taiwan, better known by its common name, the Dwarf Umbrella Tree. And in the end I come away with the distinct sense that the novel itself might be more terrain than object, a space in which to deliberate over the relationship between the political and the aesthetic, the extent to which we remain flagrantly animals, the responsibility of the artist, reader, traveler, lover, the how and why of who we become--in short, to implicate the reader in the grand questions that the book stirs up and refuses to resolve. Somewhat predictably, the shining edifice of Tsau begins to crumble and Denoon, illuminated by a newly found inner light, wafts around in white and descends into a state of abnegation. The laser-like attention she once gave to anthropology is now focused on her relationship with Denoon, and her principal thesis, apropos of mating, is this: “Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.He has “projects within projects yielding other projects,” the latest of which, she laments, is an “ostrich ranching mania.

As her relationship with Denoon unravels, she despises her own emotional reaction to it: “I realized I was doing something women did only in nineteenth-century novels.Midway through this rereading, I am struck not so much by how much richness Rush devotes to developing character (though the characters are indeed fully-wrought, at once ample and supple), but to the mission of the novel itself, which seems to be constructed as carefully and with as much openness as Tsau, the utopian outpost where the two main characters come together. The forensic scrutiny to which she subjects herself and her lover is tinged with neurosis, yet she also has a playful humour. There is an intriguing psychological component, where questions arise as to the reason Nelson wants to remain in Tsau. Perhaps the praise it received—from Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others—gave Rush the confidence he needed to compose a long novel entirely in the voice of the young anthropologist from “Bruns.

Here’s a man who keeps track of the statistics on dowry bride murders in India and “becomes palpably depressed by a split in some Spanish labor union.

First: “What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation, that particular invention: that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities. Denoon intrigues her, and she wants to get to know him intimately, so she treks solo across the Kalahari Desert to reach Tsau, where she hopes to be welcomed. Owing to Rush’s sometimes claustrophobic first-person narration, he is entirely refracted through her mind. Even as I watched she reached into one for yet another Kleenex, which she passed across her nostrils before adding it to the orb she was creating. If the narrator allows Denoon to expatiate on world-historical themes, she won’t allow him to romanticize Africa’s poor.