Synopses & Reviews
The Nobel Laureate's psychologically penetrating story of the love affair between a rich South African and the illegal alien she "picks up" on a whimWho picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably relentless emotions that overturn each one's notion of the other, and of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a marriage-that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father's set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed by her 'grease monkey' in order to present her respectably to his family.
In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again, to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert.
A novel of great power and concision, psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself.
Review
"A masterpiece of creative empathy, Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup explores the disolutions of exile and immigration with rare insight and subtlety." Edward W. Said
Review
"Gordimer is one of the great living writers." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Gordimer does not invite easy affection for her characters, and her prose can be as dauntingly dense as it is elegant....Perhaps not quite as penetrating as its immediate predecessor, The House Gun, but an artist working at this high a level demands the attention of every serious reader." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"While Nobel Prize-winner Gordimer's trenchant fiction has always achieved universal relevance...this new work attains still broader impact as she explores the condition of the world's desperate dispossessed....It's the people still trapped by economic chaos and racism who now interest this inveterate and eloquent champion of the world's outcasts." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Without romanticism, Gordimer dramatizes the paradox of privilege....It's the places that make the story so compelling, and Gordimer captures the contrasts in the beat of her prose....Even on the last page, Gordimer is still surprising us about the search for home." Hazel Rochman, Booklist (Starred Review)
Synopsis
A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa “Ranks as one of Gordimers best novels…It transcends politics and aims at a meaning higher than human striving.”---The Philadelphia Inquirer When Julie Summerss car breaks down on a street in Cape Town, a young Arab mechanic comes to her aid. Their attraction to each other is immediate. Julia, the daughter of a powerful businessman, is trying to escape a privileged background she despises. Abdu, an educated but poor illegal immigrant, is desperate to evade deportation. The consequences of this chance meeting are unpredictable and intense, as each persons notions of the other are overturned. Set in the social mix of post-apartheid South Africa and an unnamed Arab country, Nadine Gordimers The Pickup “is a masterpiece of creative empathy...a gripping tale of contemporary anguish and unexpected desire, and it also opens the Arab world to unusually nuanced perception” (Edward W. Said).
About the Author
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), the recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in a small South African town. Her first book, a collection of stories, was published when she was in her early twenties. Her ten books of stories include Something Out There (1984), and Jump and Other Stories (1991). Her novels include The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), Occasion for Loving (1963), The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1971), The Conservationist (1975), Burgers Daughter (1979), Julys People (1981), A Sport of Nature (1987), My Sons Story (1990), None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), The Pickup (2001), Get a Life (2005), and No Time Like the Present (2012). A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World, and Burgers Daughter were originally banned in South Africa. She published three books of literary and political essays: The Essential Gesture (1988); Writing and Being (1995), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures she gave at Harvard in 1994; and Living in Hope and History (1999).Ms. Gordimer was a vice president of PEN International and an executive member of the Congress of South African Writers. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain and an honorary member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also a Commandeur deOrdre des Arts et des Lettres (France). She held fourteen honorary degrees from universities including Harvard, Yale, Smith College, the New School for Social Research, City College of New York, the University of Leuven in Belgium, Oxford University, and Cambridge University.Ms. Gordimer won numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize for The Conservationist, both internationally and in South Africa.