Mating

I am only 100 pages into this immense novel by Norman Rush.  It is his Important Book.  I read another of his books - Mortals - a few years ago, and it was extraordinary but also such a feverish, intense experience that I guess I had a hangover that kept me from reading this book until now.  I'm grateful, because this is one of those fortuitous moments when they right book happens to your life at just the right time.  Not that I am considering a move to Botswana, or a return to fieldwork, or keeping a chronicle of my love affair with a utopian guru, but I have some free time right now and what I really need is a brilliant & confident female narrator.  Which we get here.  I don't think she's actually been named yet, but she's witty and depressed, an excellent observer of the weird social rituals of white expatriates in Botswana.  For a while she dates an ANC revolutionary.  This is how she describes him:

He was myopic and wore glasses, which like his weight had an effect on me.  I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them.  So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.

Please read this book.