a book
Mating
Norman Rush · 1992 · 480 pages
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want.
“Luminous . . . Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The best rendering of erotic politics . . . since D.H. Lawrence. . . . The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.”—The New York Review of Books
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man.
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.” —Newsweek
“Luminous . . . Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The best rendering of erotic politics . . . since D.H. Lawrence. . . . The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.”—The New York Review of Books
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man.
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.” —Newsweek
recommended by 4 people
sourced from public statements
Cheryl Strayed
“@de_la_lluvia Amazing book!”↗
Maggie Gyllenhaal
“For the first 50 pages, I thought it was written by a woman—it was done so convincingly in a woman’s voice. It’s about how we think about mating in terms of finding the best of our species, but what complicates that idea is the truth about human beings: They’re not perfect at all, and sometimes their imperfections are the sexiest and most appealing things to us. At the very end of the book, I think the narrator realizes that.”↗
