Mating: A Novel (Vintage International)

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NEW YORK, NY .- Katherine Champagne had never heard of “Mating,” the award-winning novel by Norman Rush, until one afternoon in 2020, when she popped into a random room on Clubhouse in the early days of that social media app. You didn’t publish your first book, Whites, until you were fifty-three. What were you writing all those years? One of the most hypnotic reading experiences I've ever had... every feminist would be proud to claim this extraordinary novel as her own Joy - There are times when our female anthropologist surprises herself on all the positive feelings her life contains. "Anther sign of being in equilibrium must be repeated feelings of equanimity about things that would normally bother you." Throughout Nar's odyssey in Tasu I kept wondering if she is the type of woman who wants a man or who needs a man. One of the abiding questions readers can pose.

Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. His understandable antipathy to anthropologists -- "Most of the official great names in anthropology were mediocrities. Some were creeps" -- complicates matters too.Gates, David (21 October 1991). "The Novelist as Ventriloquist". Newsweek.com . Retrieved 22 February 2016.

This novel is one of the most unusual I have read. It is a novel of ideas and philosophy. It explores intimacy, love, history, politics, economics, feminism, and justice. It is a little drawn out in the beginning, recounting several of the protagonist’s relationships in Gabarone, but once she starts her trek across the Kalahari, it is entirely engrossing. She is searching for the “ideal” romantic relationship. The narrative is filled with intellectual sparring and literary references. Topics include commune life, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, apartheid, and the geopolitics of southern Africa. As an added bonus, it is guaranteed to expand the reader’s vocabulary, even if it is already vast. Anyway, it confirmed my suspicion that no, a man can't really write as a woman in the first person. But for all that, the author is a major, major talent.

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Darüber und über gelegentliche sprachliche Scheußlichkeiten ("die Hinterfragung meiner eigenen Motive") kann man hinweglesen und den Roman nicht nur als Porträt des heutigen Afrikas betrachten, sondern auch als Psychogramm derer, die als Therapeuten doch zutiefst der Therapie bedürfen. Im Verzicht auf das happy ending, in seiner ernüchternden Bilanz und in der Destruktion der Heilsgewißheiten wirkt dieser Roman ehrlich." - Wilhelm Kühlmann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Mating is a sprawling novel, its narrator a close and often critical (and self-critical) observer -- with a constant air of some detachment, the scholar in her trying to separate emotion from fact. Rush was born in San Francisco and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978. Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.

New-York Historical Society explores the social and cultural consequences of the environmental crisis through art This novel is set in Botswana, about Botswana, but it is not of or for Botswana. It has been written for Americans and is more about America and American perceptions of the world than Africa. (...) Mating is, in reality, a giant short story, right down to its O'Henry-ish ending, and it might better have stopped as a novella." - Sheldon G. Weeks, Africa Today 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. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought. I made myself emerge. I peered around. My [donkeys] were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.” To me, there’s no pessimism in it,” said Piepenbring, who coordinated The Paris Review’s “Mating” book club in 2015, when he worked at the magazine. “That was exactly the kind of relationship I wanted to be in.”

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Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist.