Mating

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She wonders if Denoon is deceiving her with his new mysticism and she conspires for him to spend a night with the “beautiful Bronwen Something, a State Department intern. Photograph: Paballo Thekiso/AFP/Getty Images A chaos of misunderstanding is revealed in the Kalahari.

The protracted monologue of a 32-year-old Stanford University anthropologist who is adrift and loveless in Botswana at the dawn of the Reagan era, Mating was published by Knopf in 1991 and went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. Actually I was thinking about an aspect of my life, to wit, who would miss me the most if I was reported lost. Power, powerless, white black man woman city farmer, lack of water underlying all attempts at societal change.

With that laconic affirmation begins one of the strangest and most sublime American novels of the last half-century. Socialism, he declares, is like “knitting with oars” and adds: “show me a socialist country and I will show you a net food importer. I love that Victoria Falls is now at the top of my life list of travel destinations when I'd not had much interest in Africa before. Of course, I don't expect every book's heroine to be someone I'd like to hang out with, but this is a female William F. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978.

My three stars are awarded for the regular chuckles I got from the book, and for the depiction of some truly toe-curling characters.She was following me because I was American and seemed so at home and she was looking for someone she could impose on for something. Rather than trying to politicize his readers, Rush assumes we are as curious as he is about southern African realpolitik circa 1980, and the ideological combustions that accompanied it. I've also spent some time with the overeducated-expat-in-a-strange-land community, so frankly, i didn't find these characters all that "unbelievable" for their self-absorption, bizarre love triangles, or vocabularic gymnastics. Most pages of this book contain not only wondrous English but also some French and Latin, with frequent use of Setswana and Afrikaans, though there is a glossary for the latter two. Women dominate Tsau’s governing council; they are deeded their plots and homes; and, defying tradition, inheritance is channeled through daughters, not sons.

The forensic scrutiny to which she subjects herself and her lover is tinged with neurosis, yet she also has a playful humour. A first person narrative about a young failing female anthropologist falling in love with an older American man who has founded an egalitarian feminist commune in the heart of Southern Africa is just too cutely exotic, too cheaply high concept to work.It worked best for me as a satirical depiction of narcissists meddling in lives which, they think, need fixing.