Pickup

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

...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.

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.

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.