The Pickup

Goodbye to a blog!

Back on July 5th, we posted our First Impressions of The Pickup as we began reading it. Now we offer you our last thoughts and observations (for now) as we--like you--prepare for the work and activities that come with a new semester. Our thanks to Ariela for sharing her thoughts with us here. We look forward to reading and blogging with you again sometime. Like next year when we read that hot new science fiction thriller for the 2008 New Student Reading Project.

Wendy: Whew, what a summer!  I don't believe I have ever fully examined a book as I have with Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup.  Although I am not sad to be moving on, I believe this book will stay with me.  As we discussed in our small groups, the themes of immigration, identity, love and diversity are universal; yet I know that this is not the last time I will explore these heavy topics.  Age, experience, political and cultural changes will all influence and refine my beliefs on immigration, identity, love, and diversity.  In the meantime, I am working hard to not tie every headline I read with the varied themes of The Pickup!

Lance: As has been stated several times over the last couple of days, you don't have to LIKE a book to LEARN from a book. This may not have been the most enjoyable book I have ever read--and in terms of "fun reading" it does indeed fall far below the Harry Potter books--but it was a book that made me work to get at its meanings and it was a book that made me think.

And isn't that why we are all here? To think. And to learn and to experience new things and to meet new people and to beat Harvard in hockey.

Did you notice that the story begins with a cup of coffee--Julie picks up Abdu--and ends with a cup of tea? Julie is in the lean-to standing at the window after Ibrahim has left. Khadija comes in and offers her sympathy and some "smooth dark shiny dates." And we are left to ponder whether these two lovers, who seem to have lost each other while finding themselves, will ever see each other again.

If you would like to continue these discussions, come have coffee with us in the Libe Cafe.

"Just say the word."

Check out maps from The Pickup!

I am posting this announcement from the Collection of Maps and Geospatial Information on their current exhibition.

Nadine Gordimer's novel moves through three distinct worlds. As presented in the staccato stream of the characters' consciousness these are sometimes destinations of hope, just as often, worlds rejected. All three worlds are strangely non-specific, each one stripped in varying degrees of the national characteristics we use to define places in the real world. Gordimer doesn't want her geography freighted with our preconceptions, and so constructs a geographic backdrop against which her characters, at turns rootless and yearning for roots, can play out their story. In doing so she leaves us with a difficult challenge: what maps can we display to enhance our understanding of the novel without adding more specificity than the author intended?

We begin in South Africa -- never named in the novel, but some offhand touches of description allow us to identify it. South Africa as nation is almost incidental. Its geography, although unique, is not defining; its bureaucracy could be any bureaucracy.  The city, where Julie Summers and Abdu meet, could be any urban agglomeration in the developed world. Its streets could be any streets. We have enough to identify Johannesburg, although our initial identification is from an off-hand allusion to Soweto, Johannesburg's most well-known neighborhood. The rest is purposefully generic: "The Suburbs," or "The Northern Suburbs."

We've chosen maps that help American readers, perhaps unfamiliar with South Africa, orient themselves. Post-apartheid South Africa is only glimpsed in the novel, but we have displayed maps that provide some background for the history and the broad social forces at work in the city and the country. This world, once a hopeful destination for Abdu, rejects him. At the same time Julie discards it "rejects" is too strong a term. Both on different terms "go to another country."

That other country, even more anonymous and unspecified than South Africa, is Abdu/Ibrahim's homeland. Never named, the novel presents the country as little more than a cultural milieu and a physical geography. We see with compelling clarity the Islamic world and the Islamic family challenged by the twentieth century. We also experience the desert at the end of the village as a defining, transforming space. This space is one that Ibrahim has rejected, along with much of his culture, long before, in order to "go to another country," but it is this space which seduces Julie until she embraces it completely.

Ibrahim's homeland is not meant to be identified. Five different reviewers have confidently asserted five different countries, a testament to Gordimer's skill at presenting an Islamic country that is at once generic and convincing. We've decided to pretend that the country is Morocco. The "tomb of Sidi Yusuf" around which the place grew, according to Ibrahim, brings to mind the real tomb in Marrakesh and the environment of the Maghreb, where pilgrimages are made to tombs of Sufi holy men. Marrakesh, quite a large city, couldn?t be Ibrahim?s village, so we postulate a place like Erfoud, east of Marrakesh and on the edge of the Sahara. We have chosen maps to illustrate the many kinds of cartography that can represent a place like that, without insisting too strongly on the place itself.

The third world is the world of Ibrahim?s aspiration. Australia, Canada, Sweden, places where many like him hope to immigrate. We've used Geographic Information System (GIS) software to produce thematic maps of Detroit and Chicago -- the final(?) stops on Ibrahim's itinerary of escape.

We hope you find the maps interesting and useful adjuncts to enjoying The Pickup. Perhaps they will help you understand the state of mind which compels many, either in imagination or in reality, to "go to another country."

Recommendations for next year's book

So now we know that many of you did not particularly like this year's Reading Project book.  And we know that one of you would recommend Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August as a better choice and that some or possibly many of you would like to see a science fiction book selected for the Reading Project.

At my small group discussion meeting yesterday I asked the 18 students in attendance what they would recommend as future Reading Project books.  Here is a selection of their recommendations.

Four students included Aldous Huxley's Brave New World on their lists. And several recommended books by former Cornellians: Tony Morrison's Beloved and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan.

Two students said that our Reading Project selection from two years ago, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, was a favorite book they had read.  And perhaps could be read again.  (If so, I would recommend that we read the entire trilogy that this book begins. His novels No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God are also worthy of our attention.)

Some "classic" books showed up on their lists. Also offered as possible reading choices were James Joyce's Dubliners, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Among the many contemporary books recommended were Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club,  Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Orhan Pamuk's Snow and Irène Némirovsky's Suite Francaise.

And yes, there was a science fiction recommendation:  Dan Simmon's Hyperion.

What would you add to this list?

Send us your book and reading recommendations.

Last Thoughts before the Discussions

Yes, Lance is still on vacation!

And now you are here. You, the immigrants, have journeyed to the land of Cornell. Like Ulysses, your odyssey has brought you home to Ithaca.

Welcome.

We are nearly done here.  On Sunday we will join you in Barton Hall and on Monday we will be discussing the book with some of you for one last time. I leave you with these observations:  I am impressed and amazed at how complex simple things are. A woman picks up a guy in a garage and ends up living somewhere east of Timbuktu.

I have never seen the Sahara, but I have traveled through parts of our desert Southwest and have been awed by the stark beauty to be found there.  I am probably closer to Julie than I am to Ibrahim about deserts.  But then again I have never had to live in one. 

I come away from this novel thinking how narrow the American perspective of the world is.  What do we know of South Africa or the desert countries?  That there are diamonds and oil in these places for us to buy?  What can we learn from Islam?

This book reminds me how we have to keep our minds open to new ideas and new experiences.  And how we have to get past our initial impressions (gnarled sentences) and seek out the value that is perhaps hidden--and always waiting to be discovered--in the pages of a book.

Come visit us in the Library.

Nigel Summers, Continued

Another posting from Ariela Rutkin-Becker:

Last week I wrote about Nigel Summers’ limited understanding of Julie and its parallels in my own life.

This week I want to write about the final line that Julie’s father leaves his daughter with on page 98: “You choose to go to hell in your own way.”

What a line, huh? This line epitomizes Nigel’s confusion about Julie’s actions.  In his mind, Julie is heading down an unstable, dangerous path-and he has practically given up on trying to reverse her direction.

But on further thought, is “going to hell in your own way” really such a bad thing to do?

Class of ’11, welcome to college.  Welcome to a new stage in your life-and I say “stage” intentionally, as a theatrical stage.  As the years fly by here at Cornell, you might find that people who have played large roles drift into more minor, supporting ones.  You might find that some people who used to stand on the same stage as you drifting into the audience.
All of a sudden, you’re on a stage which is really yours to control.  For the first time ever, you’re directing the lighting (when do I sleep?). The sound (frat party tonight or Jazz at the Johnson?). Choosing the action (What will I major in? What clubs do I want to join? What road am I going down?)

And what comes naturally with an audience? The theater critics.  I’ve found that the more action I’ve taken of my life, the more I have made my own production public- the more I’ve put myself out there to be open to criticism.  This criticism has come in blatant ways- Facebook comments and emails about a controversial Sun article- or much more subtle ones- like losing contact with people from home as we pursue our own dramas, our own stages.

I can’t control what people say or what stage they are on in their own lives.  The only thing I can control is how I interpret their criticism.  It’s a tricky balance to vulnerably listen to what people have to say and reflect on it, and on the other hand to keep your head up high, marching to the beat of the drum that maybe only you can hear.

But that balance is exactly what college is for, to me.  Taking risks.  Figuring out what makes your stage your own. Choosing to “go to hell” in my own way: or, to re-work it, choosing to go wherever my drama leads me to.

So, even if in a critic’s eyes I’m going to “hell,” I can know that it’s a hell that I’ve created. A hell that is comprised of my accomplishments and my mistakes.  A hell that Nigel Summers can’t define, and a hell that Julie Summers doesn’t fear.

More Press on the New Student Reading Project!

The New York Times Online recently featured an article on college-level summer reading programs.  The article, "Summer Reading Programs Gain Momentum for Students About to Enter College", details a growing trend at colleges and universities to include, in freshman college preparations, a common reading assignment.  The article identifies a common theme of selected books from around the nation: "books that are readable, short, engaging, cheap.  Often, it helps if the book is a best seller dealing with some aspect of diversity, some multicultural encounter..."

Damn!  I hate it when anything I am associated with is so blatantly stereotypical (except, of course, my mini-van, because I LOVE my mini-van).  Anyway, the above description does a fine job of capturing The Pickup.  I think what I find so interesting is why these books "dealing with some aspect of diversity, some multicultural encounter" are often chosen.  I believe it is because the undergraduate years are typically when most students gain a global awareness.  Campuses reflect global diversity (see Lance's previous post on the demographic breakdown of Cornell students) and, for many, university is their first experience with people of certain cultures and ethnicities.

Yet, I wonder if all this preparation is necessary for the upcoming generation of college students.  My experience is that today's students come to university with a global perspective eons ahead of the past generation of students.  Could it be that this global perspective is so new for baby boomers and generation Xers that we assume that the millennials could not possibly possess it at such a young age; and, therefore, it is our responsibility to cultivate this understanding in new college students?