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Lyza Danger Gardner

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Book Review: “Mating” by Norman Rush

March 21, 2010 { Book Reviews }
Mating: A Novel

This is not a book for the impatient. Dense, demanding and highbrow, Norman Rush’s National Book Award-winning novel about an obsessive academic chasing idealized love in the Botswana bush of the early 1980s is both adorable and infuriating in its impenetrable cleverness.

To you, the reader, Norman Rush says “You’d better work as hard as I did.” Mating demands familiarity with all of the major liberal arts fields, from western philosophy to political theory. The vocabulary is borderline cruel, forcing me to keep a dictionary handy. Echt, adumbrate, lares, bouleversement, noetic, crescive, elenchus, divagate, apercus, anschluss, sessile—on nearly every page of the 500-page intellectual trial was a word I’d never even seen before. What was he thinking? Does he hate us? Maybe not, but you’d better be up-to-date on your classes of socialism and your grasp of Middlemarch and Latin phraseology.

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Site Theme: Fragrance

I like stuff that smells good, effectively to a fault. I routinely mix up cocktails of essential oils and in ceramic vessels and then set them alight. My library often smells like a forest or a savanna or a citrus grove. We own our own copper alembic still and distill our own smells, with varying degrees of success.

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Photography: Major newspaper accidentally puts a photo of mine on the front page

Newest comments regarding this post:

  • Preston said The site you link to (kiosko.net) is almost certainly violating The Oregonian’s copyright! Which is pretty ironic in a blog post about how your copyright... (More)
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Book Review: “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen

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Iceland: A challenge even for the cuisine-bold

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I use Twitter to tell people what I am doing right now.

  • Mar 20 10:33am @oleoptene What a lovely day for a birthday--have a happy one!
  • Mar 19 4:06pm So mentally exhausted I'm kind of shaking a little bit. Need a quiet room, nap, some sort of soft blankie.
  • Mar 19 1:39pm @johndalton !!!! Godspeed!
  • Mar 18 5:08pm Wow, am I the last person to see http://www.youwalkaway.com ? Is this weird? It feels weird.
  • Mar 18 10:57am Achitectural historian/awesome human spent 3 hours in our house (1890 Victorian) last night. Learned a metric butt-tonne. Overawed!

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