It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert. Bruns detests the feudal power structure of Keteng and decides, in a quixotic gesture, to confront it, for which he is savagely beaten. Second: “The destruction of nature accompanying the ascent to absolute power of the corporate system.

She arrives in Tsau severely dehydrated but triumphant: “How many women could have done this, women not supported by large male institutions or led by male guides? First: “What is becoming sovereign in the world is not the people but the limited liability corporation, that particular invention: that’s what’s concentrating sovereign power to rape the world and overenrich the top minions who run these entities.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.

And all of it is filtered through the unnamed narrators endlessly inquisitive musings, doubts and second thoughts. 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.All through the 1960s and 1970s, Rush, who was born in San Francisco in 1933, had written experimental fiction with negligible success. Here’s a man who keeps track of the statistics on dowry bride murders in India and “becomes palpably depressed by a split in some Spanish labor union. The significant and the trivial are given equal weight, and this can have a comic effect (as when the narrator documents the responses of Denoon to her farts and these include, "A report from the interior", or, "Thus spake Zarathustra"). The funny thing is, and maybe Rush meant it this way, I think it is easy to tell that the love story isn't going to work out. Mating is a requiem for a vanished global left that, in Rush’s estimation, was untainted by Russian-style communism, and at certain moments, in its lower registers, the novel imparts the same melancholy as a composition by Victor Jara, the left-wing Chilean musician tortured and executed by Pinochet’s soldiers in 1973.

I had to realize that female-style love is servile and petitionary and moves in the direction of greater and greater displays of servility whose object is to elicit from the male partner a surplus--the word was emphasized in some way--of face-to-face attention. Joy - There are times when our female anthropologist surprises herself on all the positive feelings her life contains. Listening to our attractive, scholarly lass lament over this dilemma, I hear a hint of Alison Poole's remark from Jay McInerney's novel Story of My Life: "Let's face it ladies, men are a bunch of dickheads but they're the only opposite sex we've got. 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.

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. He endures his confinement with a passivity that enrages and puzzles her: this man who can rattle on for hours about the entire history of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism is rendered docile by a few dozen malcontents on his doorstep.