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The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer Recommendation: •••
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Family Ties Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer presents well-crafted scenes, images and descriptions in her new novel, The Pickup. From South Africa to an unnamed Arab country, protagonist Julie Summers and her picked up lover, Ibrahim ibn Musa, discover each other, community, family and a sense of being in the right place. Gordimer delivers the sights and sounds with a wide range of emotions and the struggles of growth and change. There’s ample underlying tension in Julie and Ibrahim’s relationship. Here’s an excerpt of Gordimer’s fine writing: “Disappear. Like I say. Either way. He disappears into another city, another identity, keeps clear; or he disappears into deportation. They go back again at night to the EL-AY Café, away from the silence in the cottage and the slumped canvas bag, because there’s usually likely to be there someone to whom she has always felt closest, among the friends. The struggle stays clenched tightly inside her. It possesses her, alien to them, even to those she thought close; and makes them alien to her. She feels she never knew them, any of them, in the real sense of knowing that she has now with him, the man foreign to her who came to her one day from under the belly of a car, frugal with his beautiful smile granted, dignified in a way learnt in a life hidden from her, like his name. Her crows, Mates, Brothers and Sisters. They are the strangers and he is the known.” If you’ve never read Gordimer’s books, The Pickup is a fine place to begin. Fans will not be disappointed. Steve Hopkins, September 19, 2001
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