Mating Study Guide & Notes

Mating Plot Summary

Preview of Mating Summary:

In 1980, in Botswana, the narrator, an American anthropologist and doctoral candidate, emerges from the African bush after an 18-month failed attempt to gather data for her thesis. She is exhausted, undernourished, and seriously disillusioned. She wants nothing more than to at least temporarily fall back into the more luxurious, self-indulgent ways of white society in Africa and heads to Botswana's capital city, Gaborone. Hoping for rest, relaxation, and romance, the 32-year-old single woman begins to tell her story, one that will reveal almost everything about her to the reader, except for her name, which is never given.

In Gaborone, the narrator quickly finds a niche within the conglomeration of whites living there: diplomats, spies, scientists, missionaries and politicos from around the world and the Dutch-descent Boer settlers who still control much of Botswana's economic and political structure. She finds herself invited to housesit so she has a place to...
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