steysh's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
4.5
bunnieslikediamonds's review against another edition
4.0
Mixed reviews initially made me a little skeptical. It sounded terribly pretentious, plus it's an older dude writing from the POV of a young woman besotted with an older dude, you know?
Turns out pretentious and literary was just what I needed after all that easily digested crime fiction and fantasy I read these days. It was a pleasure to read, and I did not get lecherous vibes at all but found the main character very nuanced and relatable (except there is no way I would ride across the desert on a donkey for a mere man). Will have to find his other novels.
Turns out pretentious and literary was just what I needed after all that easily digested crime fiction and fantasy I read these days. It was a pleasure to read, and I did not get lecherous vibes at all but found the main character very nuanced and relatable (except there is no way I would ride across the desert on a donkey for a mere man). Will have to find his other novels.
rachel_the_managing_editor's review against another edition
I really did not like this. Annoyingly pretentious older man’s fantasy novel.
earlyandalone's review against another edition
4.0
This book was difficult and epic and strange, but it felt right to me, in a weird way.
dvybb's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
ctrlaultdelete's review against another edition
3.0
This was compellingly readable (except I agree with reviewers about the dragging middle) but almost certainly bad. I respect Rush’s decision to not try to write any African characters’ interiority but it was still a glaring omission that perhaps purposefully pointed to the narrator’s self-obsession (and tiresome obsession with Denoon as a form of self-regard through self-abnegation?). Anyway let’s hope true socialism is possible through another path?
nick_jenkins's review against another edition
5.0
It seems to me that there are two dominant literary influences on Mating: George Eliot (especially Middlemarch) and D. H. Lawrence (especially The Rainbow and Women in Love). I have never really considered the latter a fulfillment of or successor to the former, so it is a bit jolting now, having finished reading Mating, to see how Rush achieves precisely this vision of literary genealogy.
What can be said about the effect produced by this relation is relatively simple: Rush brings out a kind of double image in which the sexual and the intellectual rumble and roil beneath one another, continuously changing positions between foreground and background, text and subtext, manifest and latent content. Sexual intercourse becomes a working out of intellectual problems and intellectual intercourse becomes a working out of sexual problems.
Mating is an intellectually exhilarating experience, something more than a novel, continuously straining against the limits of English, of disciplinary taxonomies and boundaries, of individual characters' separate minds. It seems unwilling to leave something unsaid, constantly raking over itself, but in a way that is incessantly penetrating, always going deeper, rather than circular or merely repetitive. Indeed, one of the protagonists (Denoon) has a horror of repetition, while in what could easily be taken for a handful of absent-minded slips, the other (our nameless narrator) does occasionally return not only to the same ideas but the same phrases without acknowledging that she is doing so. Yet the narrator also insists that she has a perfect memory, an aptitude which she demonstrates often. This conflict between the fear of repetition and its apparent necessity is just one of the novel's innumerable threads spiraled throughout in a golden braid of ideas and themes that stretch from the political to the academic to the domestic and always reveal that in the end these ways of classifying ideas and experiences are superficial conveniences unreflective of how completely they are entangled. It is one of the enduring examples of the novel of ideas as a triumph of humanism, as an embrace not of the separation of the mind from society but of its lustrous, gem-like embeddedness in it.
What can be said about the effect produced by this relation is relatively simple: Rush brings out a kind of double image in which the sexual and the intellectual rumble and roil beneath one another, continuously changing positions between foreground and background, text and subtext, manifest and latent content. Sexual intercourse becomes a working out of intellectual problems and intellectual intercourse becomes a working out of sexual problems.
Mating is an intellectually exhilarating experience, something more than a novel, continuously straining against the limits of English, of disciplinary taxonomies and boundaries, of individual characters' separate minds. It seems unwilling to leave something unsaid, constantly raking over itself, but in a way that is incessantly penetrating, always going deeper, rather than circular or merely repetitive. Indeed, one of the protagonists (Denoon) has a horror of repetition, while in what could easily be taken for a handful of absent-minded slips, the other (our nameless narrator) does occasionally return not only to the same ideas but the same phrases without acknowledging that she is doing so. Yet the narrator also insists that she has a perfect memory, an aptitude which she demonstrates often. This conflict between the fear of repetition and its apparent necessity is just one of the novel's innumerable threads spiraled throughout in a golden braid of ideas and themes that stretch from the political to the academic to the domestic and always reveal that in the end these ways of classifying ideas and experiences are superficial conveniences unreflective of how completely they are entangled. It is one of the enduring examples of the novel of ideas as a triumph of humanism, as an embrace not of the separation of the mind from society but of its lustrous, gem-like embeddedness in it.
abroadwell's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book.
The witty, intellectual, sesquipedalian voice of the female anthropology grad student who is the narrator was perfect for me. I often laughed and made a point of remembering great lines.
And the narrative, involving socialism, capitalism, Africa, anthropology, gender, and mating was so excellent.
The witty, intellectual, sesquipedalian voice of the female anthropology grad student who is the narrator was perfect for me. I often laughed and made a point of remembering great lines.
And the narrative, involving socialism, capitalism, Africa, anthropology, gender, and mating was so excellent.
rltinha's review against another edition
5.0
Há literatura que revela uma «voz» e depois há estes portentos improváveis.
Norman Rush não se limita a pullar o stunt de ser um homem de meia idade a narrar magistralmente 600 páginas do POV de uma jovem senhora de 32 com uma personalidade forte e eivadíssima de tiques académicos. Ele faz dessa húbris (assim o referiu o próprio) uma arte da naturalidade.
As reflexões feministas, políticas e psicológicas são amplas, mas nunca se perdem do fio condutor que perpassa tudo em quase circularidade: um acasalamento.
Norman Rush não se limita a pullar o stunt de ser um homem de meia idade a narrar magistralmente 600 páginas do POV de uma jovem senhora de 32 com uma personalidade forte e eivadíssima de tiques académicos. Ele faz dessa húbris (assim o referiu o próprio) uma arte da naturalidade.
As reflexões feministas, políticas e psicológicas são amplas, mas nunca se perdem do fio condutor que perpassa tudo em quase circularidade: um acasalamento.