Ah, Nar, when you look at the world and other people as one unending competition, your horizons can flatten out quickly. This is one of my favorite books, but I am afraid to read it again and am always afraid to recommend it to other people. The forensic scrutiny to which she subjects herself and her lover is tinged with neurosis, yet she also has a playful humour. Maybe I am shallow and narrow and lack the brainpower to fully appreciate this book, but to me it is the best love story. Weeks recommends that "those who want to read a utopian novel by and for Africa, by an African might want to seek out Season of Anomy [by Wole Soyinka].

John Updike, reviewing Rush's 2003 novel, Mortals, in The New Yorker said "There was much of this claustral pillow talk—self-consciousness squared—in Rush’s previous, prize-winning novel, Mating, but there the point of view was that of the nameless female protagonist, a thirty-two-year-old anthropologist engaged in a courtship pursuit of an older, married utopian activist, and this male reader, through whatever kink in his gendered nature, was comfortable with their orgies of talk. She recoils: “But I just said that I knew about this because it had been in the Rand Daily Mail, and it was more than sad.

What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of manners: "A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously. That she and Denoon are both, at the book’s finish, devouring the same classic work of Chinese philosophical literature is Rush’s way of suggesting that politics—quasi-utopian manifestations included—will never be enough to satisfy our deepest longings; she finds the Tao full of “strange surprising discoveries.

Their relationship is built on intellectual repartee; they forge their own linguistic utopia inside the unfolding experiment that is Tsau—a quietly ingenious structural device by the author; light bounces from one utopian project to the other. But somehow, Norman Rush manages to make her and her narration into a stunning reflection and examination of intellectual and romantic life. Yes this novel was written by a male author, Norman Rush, in the 1st person as a female protagonist and it is an aloof one-directional love story at best.

I perhaps wouldn't go that far as this is not an intergenerational story or terribly complex but I see the parallels and am happy that I read it. Equilibrium or perfect mating will come when the male is convinced he is giving less than he feels is really required to maintain dependency and the woman feels she is getting more from him than her servile displays should merit.

Women dominate Tsau’s governing council; they are deeded their plots and homes; and, defying tradition, inheritance is channeled through daughters, not sons. For a novelist, Rush has an unusual fascination with history, power struggles and left-wing ideology; he once remarked to Granta that “Spanish anarchism,” eradicated by Franco, was “the best lost cause. In Africa Today, critic Sheldon Weeks states, "This novel is set in Botswana, about Botswana, but it is not of or for Botswana. For instance, he has the town summarist, kind of like a town crier, read aloud to the residents dead white male literature. The coup attempt at Tsau has deepened the fault lines in their relationship: he wants to remain in the village, to which he has a fierce emotional attachment; she has doubts about a place where scorpions show up in her bedclothes.When the cabal’s ringleader vanishes, Denoon is accused of killing him and hiding the body in the desert. The writing: the prose was nice, but he let his use of vocabulary get in between the story and the reader. In reviewing his most recent book, Subtle Bodies (2013), Rachel Arons in The New Yorker mentions his previous two, "both of which included delectable digressions on Marxism, economic policy, African development, and literature. The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading. Mating reminded me a bit of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland in that it took me fifty or so pages to realize that the unnamed narrator was supposed to be female, and only then because she spent a page or so lamenting the width of her hips.

I've read a lot, but retain little, because while so many of the critics of this book want something that sticks close to "reality," I find the best books are the ones that invent something totally unusual with characters compelling in their flaws and their virtues.has gotten the narrator into this grand house under the expectation that there is a chance that Nelson Denoon—the man who, as my compatriot Popkey puts it, “has been hovering on the novel’s margins since its very first pages”—might be in attendance. For the reader of Mating, love and politics, intimacy and justice, are held in perfect equipoise; the pitfalls and possibilities of both are precisely—and thrillingly—explored to their limits. I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood.