This is the story of a cerebral, overanalyzing woman who doesn’t want the mediocre or the nearly-great and sets her eyes on the one great man that she finds. And in the end I come away with the distinct sense that the novel itself might be more terrain than object, a space in which to deliberate over the relationship between the political and the aesthetic, the extent to which we remain flagrantly animals, the responsibility of the artist, reader, traveler, lover, the how and why of who we become--in short, to implicate the reader in the grand questions that the book stirs up and refuses to resolve. She recoils: “But I just said that I knew about this because it had been in the Rand Daily Mail, and it was more than sad.

Nar is the kind of person who thrives on verbal sparring to establish her intellectual and personal superiority. After praising “Mating” as “aggressively brilliant,” Updike took Rush to task for his “aggressive modernist designs on conventional reading habits,” epitomized by his ostentatiously arcane vocabulary. I was hoping to like this book after his new book Subtle Bodies was reviewed in the London Review of Books and Rush rated as a contemporary D. 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.And keep your dictionary handy as you'll come across vocabulary worthy of Vladimir Nabokov - several examples: passim, anti-makhoa, cinéphile, douceur, omphalos. Anther sign of being in equilibrium must be repeated feelings of equanimity about things that would normally bother you. 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? 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.

We may be convinced that this is objectively wrong, I told him, but unfortunately the evidence is that the Basarwa are delighted with the deals. Nevertheless, the women-run village in Botswana that he establishes in an interesting setting and suggests connections between personal relationships and foreign development of Africa. I've been meaning to read this for at least 10 years, and only because I think some family members were reading it. I liked seeing a woman who wasn't trivial, was a thinker, maybe even an overthinker, which to me was spot on. The writing: the prose was nice, but he let his use of vocabulary get in between the story and the reader.But he has concealed the fact that he is a recovering alcoholic, and when she realizes it (during the wine-soaked dinner with the actor) she feels betrayed, and—yes—lied to. It follows our narrator as she travels 100 miles through the Kalahari desert to the community of Tsau. But then came the story's denouement, in which the narrator's total supplication and abasement seemed so grossly out-of-character that I wanted to throw the book across the room (I would have too, except I finished it on an airplane where this wasn't really an option). Perhaps because the balloon of erudition was so skilfully over-inflated by the author, a couple of tiny pinpricks deflated it. What follows, over nearly five hundred pages, is a multilayered dialogue between political utopianism and private perfection.

If the narrator allows Denoon to expatiate on world-historical themes, she won’t allow him to romanticize Africa’s poor. It is akin to the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses, in which we must decipher Stephen Dedalus’s free-flowing, elusive ruminations (“Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now”) or various sections of Nostromo, Conrad’s novel about Western imperialism in Latin America (“during the long turmoil of pronunciamientos that followed the death of the famous Guzmán Bento, the native miners, incited to revolt…”). About a third of the way I began to wonder if I hadn't stumbled across some sort of post-Nabokovian masterpiece.

Oh, yes, when it comes to a combination of intellect and good looks, Nar tells us flatly, "My preference is always for hanging out with the finalists. She, on the other hand, frequently gazes inward (“I’ve done what I do best, made an academic study of myself”) and worries about her future with Nelson (“Where were we going? He’s supposed to be this brilliant man, a feminist, who is creating a Utopian, matriarchal society and giving impoverished African women agency but this model society is based on Western ideals.

The coup attempt at Tsau has deepened the fault lines in their relationship: he wants to remain in the village, to which he has a fierce emotional attachment; she has doubts about a place where scorpions show up in her bedclothes. Along with Infinite Jest and Middlemarch, one of the few books I've read that are so impossibly intelligent they seem written by a higher life form. The New York Times also lists the book as having received multiple votes on their 2006 survey "What is the best work of American Fiction of the last 25 years? where he had earned a living as an antiquarian bookseller, to Gaborone, Botswana’s capital, to be co-directors of the Peace Corps in that country.

He’s an overachieving and well-known intellectual who’s running an experimental matriarchal-utopian village in the middle of the Kalahari. 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.