Mating

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She was less than twenty-five and had a very cute figure, which she tailored her nurse costume to explot.

I love that I had to look up words and that even if I can never say "inter pocula" to describe someone who is inebriated without feeling a little pretentious, it's a nice phrase to have in one's arsenal. Just then I was trying to see the relationship between Nelson's cynical observation that the meaning of life in every formulation seemed to reduce to finding or inventing a perfect will to be subject to, the relationship of that to scanting remarks about la femme moyenne sensuelle--which we agreed I was not, of course--finding her raison d'etre in the love of a male as close to alpha as she can get. Argument - "We argued about everything, but a lot of it devolved into arguments about his basic philosophical anthropology. Instantly Nar concludes Nelson must be conducting a clandestine relationship with one of the women in the community.It would be about as hard to read me as being in the kitchen and noticing when the compressor went on in the refrigerator. That self-knowledge gives rise to Mating’s most radiant sentence: “I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same. Rush's novel is a fairly unrelenting slog - 477 pages of text rarely broken by paragraphing, let alone by the sweet relief of dialogue - narrated by an unlikeable and frankly unreliable woman who meets a guy she doesn't even really seem to like at a party and then stalks him across a desert because she has absolutely nothing better to do with her life. The cover art for Mating, like that for Rush's earlier short story collection Whites, and later novel "Mortals", incorporates a detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych by Hieronymous Bosch.

The writing: the prose was nice, but he let his use of vocabulary get in between the story and the reader.

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. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is ‘The Prophet. At times wildly comic but also magnificently cerebral, Mating is a profound exploration of the human condition and a moving love story, circling the question ‘what do men and women really want?

I say nominally because, eight years after founding the village, Denoon can't bring himself to relinquish control. He says that the novel "is state-of-the-art artifice: she [the narrator] talks, she introspects, she even suffers.The unnamed protagonist of Mating is an American thirty-something nutritional anthropologist living in Botswana in the 1980s.