Today Wendy and I are joined by a guest student blogger who will be contributing posts here on Thursdays over the next month.
Ariela Rutkin-Becker is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in Near Eastern Studies. This summer she is in Ithaca, officially employed as a bookworm (leading a Book Club for teens through Cornell Adult University). Ariela was involved with the Gatsby Reading Project last year as well, and in her free time is attempting to learn how to golf. Here's her first posting:
At the end of reading The Pickup, and even months after, I feel an ineffable discomfort that has been shared by my friends to whom I've recommended the book. Do we feel this unease because we are left wondering if Julie and Abdu truly love each other?
In a society in which books such as Wuthering Heights, The Thorn Birds and, of course, Romeo and Juliet reign over the English classroom and thus help us to mold our adolescent views of an all-encompassing, blinding love, can we accept Julie and Abdu's relationship? As the book proceeds, we see that the characters not only have very different backgrounds, drastically different ideal dreams for themselves, but also very different views of what the other should be.
Vanity Fair wrote that Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (a professor at Cornell) was the only convincing love story of our age. This invariably causes a visceral snort; Lolita on the surface is about a twelve-year-old who becomes victim to the will and desire of her much older, obsessive stepfather. Hardly a love story, at first glance, eh?
Can the same, then, be questioned about The Pickup? Is The Pickup a
convincing love story--is it even a love story? Are we convinced that
people such as Julie and Abdu exist, and that if they do exist, they could form a relationship similar to the one Gordimer creates?
Is Julie and Abdu's love simply more realistic than we're used to--the
setting of the actual Pickup, the friends' reactions, the complications
that arise--and in a romantic society it's hard for us to swallow a
less-than-perfect love story? Perhaps they're just attached to each other for personal gain and it's not love? Or a combination of both...?
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