Customer Reviews

The Pickup

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I tend to read Nobel Prize-winning writer Nadine Gordimer's books more out of a sense of duty than pleasure, but in this intense work, she's produced a page-turner as gripping as her apocalyptic July's People.

The story is told against two backdrops, from the perspective of two very different people, who "pick each other up". It's a cliche to say their lives are changed forever by their encounter, but Gordimer introduces fresh and complex twists into this most ancient of plots --Boy Meets Girl, and Nothing is Ever the Same Again.

Julie Summers, the archetypal poor little rich girl, meets Adbu -- not his real name -- in a garage workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa. Julie is in flight from her privileged background and splintered family; Abdu is an illegal immigrant from an impoverished desert nation, desperate to make a better life for himself. They become lovers, and a chain of events is set in motion that eventually leads to marriage, deportation and exile in a remote desert village in Africa.

The powerful erotic tension between them keeps them together, in spite of the widening gulf between their goals and values. Julie -- who takes for granted so many of the advantages that come with her background of wealth and status -- is fascinated by the strange new world, the exotic culture, religion and language into which her bond with Abdu plunges her. She is mesmerised by the desert, and builds deepening bonds with the women of the clan. Abdu, however, is almost fanatically determined to emigrate to a Western nation and build a "good life", one with the security and comforts that Julie has the luxury of despising.

Gordimer is an incisive and intelligent as ever in exploring complex issues, and she has her finger on the pulse of issues perplexing both post-apartheid South Africa and the global village. Migrancy and refugee movements have become major issues for the 21st century, with wealthier countries adopting increasingly hard-line attitudes and policies, even though many of them were founded by immigrants. In a relatively short book, Gordimer also touches deftly on the entire range of questions raised by cross-cultural relationships -- from the intimate and domestic to the broad and metaphysical ones of religion and identity. She also provides a fascinating study of how two people who love each other can fail utterly to understand one another.

I've withheld a fifth star only because I was slightly dissatisfied with the ending; Gordimer often resists closure, but I am a little wary with the trend in current South African writing that has women accepting the "lesser portion" and resigning themselves to fate. But I recognise that the ending is what will spark much debate about this fine work. So, to find out what actually happens -- read the book!

...if you like books that complicate conventional notions of love. The first half of the book is a disorienting bit of restraint, the meaning of which is only revealed once the story's location changes at the mid-point to some unnamed poor African country. Then you see these two characters' lives crossing at an intersection that we might call love. Or are these just the colliding desires of two desperate and unhappy people? Gordimer is a master of economy and subtle observance. There is not an ounce of crap in this book. It's not just about love but about the contemporary world and its stupefyingly unfair inequalities, but also about the startling similarities that people can share amid those inequalities.

Okay let's start with what I didn't like......the ending. I found it terribly unsatisfying....perhaps because I am a romantic and had hoped for something more along those lines.

That said. As a whole I loved the book for its wonderful writing, challenging to read at times, but a unique and interesting voice that seemed to suit the characters and the plot. I haven't read anything else by this author so I can't compare it with her other works, but I am intrigued enough to pick up another of her novels in the future.

What works in the novel is the exploration of the clash of cultures that infiltrates a love relationship between two people of very disparate backgrounds, and the differing motivations they bring to their relationship. Do they ultimately both get what they wanted? Some would argue yes, even in the end. I just would have preferred the storybook happy ending. But that's my cultural and romantic bias.

This book is very subtle and beautiful. The carefully detailed explanation of the relationship that grows and changes between Julie and Abdu is exquisite. The interactions of Julie and her family, and then the quietly growing connections Julie makes in Abdu's desert family, the roots she puts down when she had no anchors until then, are described to perfection. The end of the book is inevitable, once you know it. But although I gradually came to accept and understand it, I am left after reading the last few pages with an ache in my chest for all of the characters.

My only complaint is that some of Gordimer's sentences are so tortured and indecipherable I had to read them three times before I could figure them out. Now what's that about? Does she mean for the sentences to be that convoluted? Is this due to bad editing? I know it's not me, as I have read many so-called "difficult" authors: among them Nabokov, Lessing various Russians, Japanese etc. Gordimer is writing in English, my native language, for heaven's sake.

BUT---nevertheless I strongly recommend this atmospheric, evocative, painful novel.

Through the use of a highly creative writing style, almost `expressionistic' in character, Gordimer describes a wonderful illustration of a human transformation. The protagonist is a girl from the privileged White South African Bourgeois, who was virtually surrounded by privilege and opportunity. At least that is how it seems to an immigrant from a poor Islamic country in Europe. And, yet, unlikely as it would seem, she falls in love with this immigrant who is working as a garage mechanic. Having been raised in a more enlightened age in Modern South Africa, it does not seem inappropriate to either her or her bohemian friends at the Café/Restaurant that she frequents for her to do so.

He has hopes that his involvement with her will help him stay in the country, which is trying to expel him, but he did not initially intend to fall in love. His vision is one of success that looks so sweet from outside the capitalist economies of the world, but can be so elusive once one enters within. Her vision seems yet to be developed. She has a job, which could be done in most parts of the world. She is an educated girl. And yet, she finds herself, through her own choice transported to the world of the desert; a world without computers and supermarkets. True, there is some electricity and there are cell phones and TV's, but not too much else in the way of modern day amenities, including a lack of running water. But there is always what becomes a strange allure of the desert around her.

With technique that is nothing short of brilliant, Gordimer renders a tale of rejection of values from all sides. The man is rejecting the values of his homeland, and the woman is doing likewise, but neither knows truly what they seek at the end of their journey. The interplay of cross-cultural interaction is deeply conveyed within the text. The richness of communication, between people who speak more non-verbally, than with words is portrayed with particular alacrity. Many of the deepest thought processes are left for the reader to understand by inference. And the solutions to problems in the journey are particularly uniquely resolved. The book is truly a modern day piece of literature.

No Pat Answers. A Book Review of The Pick Up, Nadine Gordimer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, copyright 2001

Required reading for any sophisticated reader and non-Muslim women that are involved with, considering involvement with or have been involved with "the other", in this case a Muslim man.

The main female character, Julie, is adrift in her middle class life. She is annoying, self-centered, independent yet vague. She and her friend spend many hours at the EL-AY Table in a cafe somewhere in a cosmopolitan South African location. Here, these folks bide and chat away their time while claiming each other as family. Involved in each other's lives, they are liberal, artist, freedom-loving, accepting and kind of vacuous. Abdu is working illegally, in a nearby garage. His Arabic country of origin remains unnamed throughout the book. We are given a sense of his physicality, his respect for authority and wealth and his incredible desire to flee his own country for a better life.

The characters on their own.....bore. "She is aware of having to learn in a circumstance she, in all her confident discard of conventional ones, finds she had no preparation for. He, her find; it was also this one, to be discovered in herself." Together, the characters intrigue. Their relationship launches from the land of great chemistry.

Casually, Julie "picks up" Abdu, or does he pick her up? The question subsides as what sometimes happens with people, happens, they fall in love. The sexuality and love-making are very tastefully and elegantly described. "That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine."

We are unassumingly lead down the path this relationship follows. Ms. Gordimer's voice of the white South African female, circa the mid 1990s, agilely tiptoes into inter-racial, cross-cultural relations without being too self conscious or too precious. The author's style is aloof and occasionally dry while maintaining impeccable style. This winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature describes events, emotions, and interactions as though they are playing out behind a gauzy silk veil, with light, catch-a-glimpse-if-you-can elusiveness.

The two lead characters progress to an unpredictable place, in such a way that usually only happens to real people. The author writes as if the story is being told to her as she tells it to us; this is an unfolding we are experiencing together. Her topics captivate: Human relationship, love, sex, family, country, life path, intimacy, interconnectedness; the rich list continues on.... Whether or not we are happy with the conclusion of this story pales next to being privy to a rich, deep, complex relationship and being invited to visit another country.

I have just finished this book and, while deeply satisfied with the story, I doubt I can tell you what it is 'about', just to recommend it highly.

There is a lot of irony, coming from Gordimer, especially when describing the aimless, 'politically correct' (to use an expedient term), loosely-formed political/apolitical group the heroine hangs out with at a local cafe, having eschewed, partly, her divorced parents' suburban living style. The first half of the book deals with a kind of undefined life in South Africa now, mixed in ways not possible during apartheid and lacking obvious goals in life. The second half, the protagonist's decision to go back with her Arab lover to his (nameless) country, gives us more glue, more fleshed-out characters, a richly detailed story of the lover's Islamic family in a poor village in this desert country. Reasons why Arabs and others emigrate are made obvious. So is the shallowness of some of these reasons. The aimless 'girl', about 30, slowly changes and finds something she didn't have, or know existed, in her South Africa, comparatively rich in opportunities for her, contrasted with those for her lover. I kept thinking she was Berger's Daughter, from an earlier novel of Gordimer. Both are alienated -- Berger's Daughter by virtue of circumstance -- she has lost her radical, anti-apartheid, prominent parents and, for a long time, she seemed buffeted by social forces and groups of people, had no governing center for herself; Julie in The Pickup (an ironic title itself, which obtains throughout the book) also allows circumstance to push her, has no inner principle to guide her life. In this book the protagonist does move, movingly, to a point of making her own needful, radical decision and it is both inevitable and a satisfying surprise.

"The Pickup (PU)" may be Nadine Gordimer's best novel to date. Her observations about social and cultural conflict and the universal truths revealed in her latest is proof indeed that, despite her well entrenched reputation as an African novelist, Gordimer's aim is lofty and wide and the result is that she has successfully avoided being cast in the limiting mould of an ethnic writer.

PU doesn't necessarily make easy reading. Gordimer's prose is terse, occasionally difficult, and distancing. Her perspectives often shift from Julie to Abdu and back again without any warning, so you may find yourself stranded in mid air - like a deer caught in the headlights - but the discomfort is only temporary because you quickly find your feet and recover. The style that Gordimer has chosen to write in isn't alienating but curiously congruous within the context of the social and cultural issues she surfaces in this tale with an otherwise well worn premise of a white girl picking up a black boy and paying the price of her socially disgraceful act.

Julie Summers is a white girl from a privileged background in South Africa. She despises her father's life of business, privilege and distinction, choosing to spend her time hanging out with her other liberal minded friends at the "EL-AY Café Table", where they congregate daily to [complain] about social injustices, etc. Abdu is an illegal immigrant, working long hours like a "grease monkey" in a run down garage and desperate to make a living in his newly (albeit illegally) adopted home. Julie picks Abdu up after a chance meeting. They become lovers and when Abdu gets deported, Julie decides to marry him and they return to his natural home, an unnamed country in Africa.

The internal conflicts and struggles in their relationship before and after leaving South Africa arise from their contrasting backgrounds and the unspoken cultural baggage that accompany them. To Julie, dignity is about principles - she baulks at crawling back to Daddy for help. For Abdu, it is about survival and building a better life for himself, so he finds Julie's attitude genuinely puzzling. Julie gives scarcely a thought to the meaning of "home" for she always had one. For Abdu, his natural home is a hell hole from which he must escape to find another that allows him to fulfil his potential. Then there are Julie's friends at the Table. What do they really know and what do they stand for ? Is their all talk and no action simply a pastime for privileged white youths ?

When the second half of the story moves permanently to black Africa, we sense the subtle changes creeping into the relationship between Julie and Abdu, who becomes Ibrahim, his real name. Here, Gordimer shows great intuition judging their behaviourial shifts as they make the transition. In his own habitat, Abdu becomes even more silent, concentrated and tunnel visioned. Julie's quiet acceptance of her new family's ways shows a genuine attempt to blend in and is both touching and real. Still an outsider, Julie seeks solace in her visits to the "desert at the end of the road" - her secret place - where she recoups her resources and regains her sense of balance and perspective. Like us perhaps, Abdu waits for Julie to crack up and reveal her true mettle as one of the boys at the Table. But Gordimer has other ideas and the ending she has devised contains a jaw dropping twist nobody will foresee. It is the novelist's expression of eternal surprise and compassion that encapsulates the human spirit. A beautiful ending. "The Pickup" resonates with a power and optimism that makes this one of the most compelling and deeply satisfying novels I have read. I'm surprised it didn't make it beyond the 2001 Booker Prize longlist. In my opinion, it's more substantial than and far surpasses some which made the shortlist.

Julie Ackroyd Summers is a successful young woman in her early thirties working for a public relations office in Johannesburg. One day, her car breaks down and she is rescued by a mechanic called Ibrahim who is an illegal employee at a garage near the EL-AY café where Julie is a regular patron. Ibrahim comes from an unnamed Arab country and Julie falls in love with him. Their relationship has to be kept secret all the more since Julie despises her privileged background. She is outright ashamed of her father - a businessman whose sole interest in life is money - and his new wife Danielle as well as of her mother who abandoned her daughter to marry a casino owner in California.

When Ibrahim receives the order to depart from South Africa within 14 days because he is in contravention of the termination of his permit, Julie tries to resort to every legal way to prolong Ibrahim's sojourn, but to no avail. When Julie informs her father that she intends to accompany Ibrahim back to his homeland, he tells her bluntly: "You choose to go to hell in your own way." Before they depart, Julie and Ibrahim get married. Yet life in the small Arab village is far from hell. Although Ibrahim's sole concern is to obtain a visa for an English speaking country, Julie adapts quite nicely to her new surroundings, learns Arabic, teaches English and participates in the family life. When Ibrahim is granted a visa for America at last, he can't believe what decision his wife has taken...

A beautiful, powerful novel about characters and their notions of the other being totally overturned. The social mix created by Mrs Gordimer between contemporary South Africa and the small Arab village in the desert is truly stunning. Let alone to see how much it takes for love to survive the circumstances of emigration and immigration, it is well worth reading "The Pickup".

"Clustered predators round a kill. It's a small car with a young woman inside it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans, motorcycles butt and challege one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman."

The book started with the paragraph above. Its language is nonchalantly smooth and effortless, captures the characters eloquently and the environment with economical words.

The language is between the work of an artist and a detail observer of human activities. The setting is in South Africa. The characters are real, too real to believe.

From a simple occurence of a breakdown car, Julie and Abdu meets each other and their meaningful (or meaningless) lives are pushed towards a direction of passion, and love. That is before reality enters the picture.

Written with simplicity and reality; and the prose of a master story teller, The pickup is one of my favourite books and it ranks up there with novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay etc.

I love it.