The Pickup

Rating:
Summary: Overrated writer
Review: Looks like I'm the second reader from the small town of Los Osos, CA who was underwhelmed with this book. I didn't appreciate the choppy style of writing which seemed more laziness than intentional craft. Also found the premise more than a little difficult to swallow.

Rating:
Summary: No Pat Answers
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable, until the end
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: More than a Pickup
Review: The Pickup is a really wonderful story. The character of Julie is thoroughly engaging, as she changes from a flighty bohemian to a seasoned woman. This novel would make a wonderful, timely film, and were I a filmmaker I'd do it in a flash.

The reviewer above who criticized Gordimer's writing does not know what he's talking about. What he perceives as grammatical errors are mostly matters of style. There were, however, a few editing slips--and it probably is because editors are timid when confronted with a writer of Gordimer's stature. Unfair to the author; Doris Lessing once noted that she has to be extremely self-critical because she gets little editorial support.

Rating:
Summary: Nadine Gordimer has done it again
Review: The Pickup is a thought provoking read touching on several topical issues of which one is the encounter between Western-style and Oriental/Islamic cultures. This cultural encounter is embedded in the relationship between the unlikely couple Abdu/Ibrahim and Julie, both escapees from their respective origins.
Abdu/Ibrahim is illegally living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa, having fled his poor origins in an unnamed Arab country in search of a better life in a Western-style country. Julie, daughter of rich parents, has renounced her businessman father (her parents are divorced) in favour of a Bohemian lifestyle with her lay-about friends.
The two are attracted to each other not only sexually but also by what they repesent to each other. Abdu (as he is called in South Africa) is in awe of the kind of life Julie has left behind and Julie is drawn to Abdu's oriental origins, his quiet ways, and the enigma surrounding him, a welcome spice in her otherwise bland life.

Circumstances take the couple from South Africa to the unnamed Arab country, to Ibrahim's (his name in that country)impoverished village at the edge of the desert. In spite of the enormous difference in the social set up and culture Julie settles down and gets involved. Life begins to make sense to her and she is eventually accepted by Ibrahim's family and the community as a whole. However, Ibrahim, now her husband, is wasting no time finding ways to get out of there. When he eventually succeeds to get a visa for a Western country she chooses to stay behind.
Gordimer's description of the life of the rich (black and white) in affluent Northern suburbs of Johannesburg is at the same time amusing and sad. She is not afraid of moving the setting out of Africa, and fascinatingly describes life in Ibrahim's poverty stricken village. I missed her usual irony though in the last half of the book.
I am not sure that I find the ending credible, but that makes it even more intriguing. It is a story that stays with you for a long time and makes for interesting and heated debates. The story line is novel and surprising and Gordimer's characterisation is brilliant as usual. In the beginning I did find her new style a bit affected, irritating, and unnecessary (It is almost as if she is experimenting), but one soon forgets about it as the story starts to grip you. I wonder, though, would I have persevered if it had not been for her good name and reputation? I am glad I did. A compelling read.

Rating:
Summary: two books in one
Review: This book goes deep in explaining how a western woman may find herself desiring non-western conventions. Is it just the novelty of the situation, the novelty of dating someone from a different background, the underdog? Or is the woman desiring another life completely different from her own? From the man's perspective, you wonder through the whole book if what he sees in her is love or if she means an opportunity to settle in a western developed country.

The first part of this book is set in South Africa, the woman's country, while the second is set in Abu's no-named but Arabian underveloped country. The first part of the book is pretty conventional, but it does get much better - I thought that the first part was in truth stage-setting for the second part.

At the end of the book, I was left wondering if the two main characters were looking for love in each other or looking for means to fill their lives with true meaning. I was also left wondering why the most appropriate choice is not always what it seems from the outside.

Rating:
Summary: Highly atmospheric; left me close to tears
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Sorry I picked it up...
Review: This was the first book I've read by Nadine Gordimer--and it will also be my last. The story on the dust jacket intrigued me, and although I read the book very quickly I thought it was deeply flawed. Gordimer's clumsy writing style was distracting and seemed contrived. Moreover, I found her attempt at treating the themes of globalization and cross-cultural interaction very stereotypical. The protagonist Julie is a poor little rich girl who is depicted with veiled contempt and condescenion by the author. I couldn't muster up much sympathy for her either. Once Julie and her lover "Abdu" go to his unnamed homeland, the story becomes completely preposterous and it is obvious that Gordimer does not know what she is talking about and does not know much about Middle Eastern culture. By refusing to be specific about Abdu's country, Gordimer engages in orientalism--so I was really surprised to see that Edward Said gave this book a glowing review. For a better treatment of cross cultural issues, I would recommend Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul.

Rating:
Summary: At The End Of The Rainbow
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: pseudo intellect
Review: Title says it all. It dragged and was difficult to follow. The Middle East scenes were not well researched.