Vintage International
4 total works
Norman Rush returns with his finest work to date - the long-awaited follow-up to Mating, winner of the 1991 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. Mortals constitutes the final element in Norman Rush's trilogy on the Western presence in contemporary southern Africa. Set in Botswana in the 1990s, it is a political adventure, a social comedy and a passionate love story. Mortals chronicles the misadventures of three expat Americans: a contract CIA agent, operating undercover as a teacher of Milton in a private school; his beloved but disaffected wife; and an iconoclastic black holistic physician on a personal mission to 'lift the yoke of Christian belief from Africa'. The machinations of these three entangle them with a local populist leader whose purposes are grotesquely misconstrued by the CIA. And when a violent but pathetic insurrection erupts - stoked in part by the erotic and political intrigues of the American trio - the outcome is both explosive and explosively funny. Mortals examines with wit and insight the dilemmas of power, religion, rebellion, and contending versions of liberation and love, through lives lived ardently in an unforgiving land.
Botswana is indelibly Norman Rush's fictional territory, and Mortals is his most commanding work.
Botswana is indelibly Norman Rush's fictional territory, and Mortals is his most commanding work.
The first major novel by the author of the critically-acclaimed short story collection Whites. A comedy of manners on the grandest scale, the story revolves around two Americans on the loose (one of them on the prowl) in developing Africa. It follows a woman's search for a worthy male, which takes her from her academic anthropology studies to a utopian matriarchal community in Botswana. A modern, international, male rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, this is a bold and extraordinary book. Winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
Whether they are American, British or a stubborn and suicidally moral Dutchman, Norman Rush's whites are not sure why they are in Botswana, and this uncertainty makes them do very strange things.
When Douglas, the ringleader of a clique of self-styled wits of "superior sensibility" dies suddenly, his four remaining friends are summoned to his luxe estate high in the Catskills to memorialize his life and mourn his passing.