Volume 50, Number 14 · September 25, 2003
Strange News
By Hilary Mantel
Mortals
by Norman Rush
Knopf, 715 pp., $26.95
When Norman Rush went to Botswana in 1978 he arrived in a country largely uncolonized by the writing imagination. As the Bechuanaland Protectorate, the country existed in the yellowed journals of missionaries, their pages crisped by the dry heat. Post-independence, it had one novelist, Bessie Head, a refugee from South Africa. She was a woman of mixed race and volcanic temperament, living uneasily in a large tribal village, and subject to periodic bouts of madness; in those days, hardly anyone read her. So when Rush arrived as codirector of a Peace Corps project, Botswana was a country waiting to be written into being: endless tracts of scorched blue air, a vast uninscribed wilderness of scrubland, the dazzling salt pans whiter than paper.
Review, 5646 words
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