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 whim Who 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
"The collision of personal and political agendas and ideals is analyzed with radiant precision and wit....Several of the [stories] are commandingly terse, including the parabolic title story....Gordimer can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now writing. Maybe they should give her the Nobel Prize again." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"These stories are rarely easy. Their language is swift, often fiercely compressed. Gordimer flouts conventions of syntax, requiring the reader to reconstruct sentences. But she possesses ample creative energy to lead you through them all, and the best of them, without frank teaching, are dulce and utile both." Jonathan Penner, The Washington Post
Review
"Gordimer is one of the great living writers." Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
Masterly new fiction from the recipient of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureA startling new work: ten fictions, each a revelation of our interior lives, each entering unforeseen contexts of our contemporary world. In the title story, an earthquake exposes both an ocean bed strewn with treasure among the dead and the avarice of the town's survivors. In "The Diamond Mine," a woman recalls her youthful surreptitious sexual initiation, while she and her parents chauffeured a young soldier to his wartime embarkation. The anopleles mosquito brings death to the saunas and other playgrounds of the developed world in "The Emissary." "Mission Statement" is the story of a development agency official's idealism, the ghosts of colonial history, and a love affair with a government official that ends astoundingly. "The Generation Gap" turns the "gap" upside down when a father's bid for freedom shocks his adult children. In "Homage," one of Europe's aliens visits the grave of the politician he was paid to assassinate. In "Karma," Gordimer's inventiveness knows no bounds: in five returns to the earthly life, taking on different ages and genders, a disembodied narrator testifies to unfinished business--critically, wittily--and questions the nature of existence.
About the Author
Nadine Gordimer is the author of 12 previous novels as well as numerous collections of stories and essays, all published by FSG; her most recent work includes None to Accompany Me (1994) and The House Gun (1998), both novels, and Living in Hope and History (2000), a collection of her reminiscences. She has received many awards, including the Booker Prize (for The Conservationsist, in 1974) and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Table of Contents
Loot -- Mission statement -- Visiting George -- The generation gap -- L,U,C,I,E. -- Look-alikes -- The diamond mine -- Homage -- An emissary -- Karma.