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."

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.

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?

The Book within the book

In the middle of The Pickup (p. 143) we find Julie reading passages from a copy of The Koran that she had asked her distant mother to send to her. They are verses that Ibrahim's mother knows by heart. With these gestures Julie has moved closer to both her mother and her mother-in-law.

What are we to make of these quotations that Gordimer has placed at the very center of her story? They are from the sacred writings of Islam, but they are versions of the Biblical stories of Job and the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus. Julie wonders what they "might mean to the one who still could recite [them]." And we wonder what do they mean to Julie?

The third quotation states:  "The God of Mercy hath taught the Koran." (p. 146)  Julie is using the Koran to both learn about her new family and to teach them about her and her language. Later Ibrahim's father gives the couple a  "beautiful old Koran...for the education of [their] children and [their] children's children." (p. 240)

Julie is changed by reading from this book, The Book. It is not a spiritual conversion, but it is profound.  She is reaching out to Ibrahim and his family and their culture. Yet she leaves the book open to these verses from The Prophets:

"...He hath let loose the two seas which meet each other: Yet between them is a barrier which they overpass not."

You Are What You Read

And presently more than 8 million readers in the United States and countless more worldwide are young wizards.  (I am the designated second reader of our household copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so please, let's not talk about the details of the book just yet.)  For now I remain in the desert with Julie and Ibrahim, and with the photographer, Edward Curtis, in Marianne Wiggins' new novel, The Shadow Catcher.

Last week the New York Times ran a story about what some of our corporate leaders are reading, C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.  (Remember you will need to acquire a free registration from the Times to access this article from their website.) It was fascinating to learn that Steven Jobs recently sold his collection of William Blake books.  (Gordimer quotes from Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience on p.66 of The Pickup.) And the venture capitalist, Michael Moritz, occasionally re-reads T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom for inspiration. (That's Lawrence of Arabia. Julie refers to him dismissively on p. 198.)

At Harry Potter in translation we learn that many of the Potter books have been translated into multiple languages, including Afrikaans and Arabic. I don't believe Ibrahim would read Harry Potter.  We are told that, "he is a reader of newspapers" (p. 35). Perhaps Cornell professor, Robert Frank's new book, The Economic Naturalist would interest our former economics major? Maybe not.

However, I'm fairly certain that Julie has put down her Dostoievsky and is reading Harry Potter along with us this summer.

Harry Potter Fans Unite!

I hope I don't get in trouble for saying this, but, stop reading The Pickup right now!  Instead, take a long nap this afternoon, find a pair of plastic black glasses, snap off a twig from the tree outside, and join me at the Grand Hallows Ball this evening at midnight to celebrate THE book of the year!

According to The Regulator Bookshop, a well-known, independent bookstore in Durham, North Carolina, "this is the last Harry Potter book, and it will quite likely be the last time in any of our lifetimes that people will line up, in the middle of the night, all across the country, and all across the world, to buy a book to see "what happens next in a story."  The only other time this has ever happened...was with Charles Dickens more than 150 years ago when crowds waited on the quays in New York for the ship carrying the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop to dock, calling out to the passengers and crew, "Is Little Nell dead?."

This is why I am taking our two daughters (ages 4 and 2) to the midnight celebration of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Although they have no idea who Harry Potter is, they will someday become absorbed in Harry's adventures (if I have anything to say about it).  I feel it is my parental responsibility to ensure that they are a part of this historic moment.  I want them to be able to say, "I waited at the bookstore until midnight when the final installment of Harry Potter was released."

I just received an email from a coworker last night asking me to contribute my predictions about who will die in the final installment.  I was surprised by the diversity of responses; I thought everyone, like me, assumed it would be Harry and Voldemort.  So, what do you think; who will meet their death in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?

Gnarled Syntax

You probably have noticed that the language and writing style of The Pickup can make it a challenge to read, at first. The point of view and narrative perspective seem to shift, and the fragmentary sentences and syntax are difficult to follow. Sometimes I have to reread a paragraph or dialogue sequence to figure our who is saying what to whom.  The lack of quotation marks doesn't help. Why did she leave them out?

Nadine Gordimer is an author who experiments with prose techniques and conventional storytelling.  As described in an online guide to her writing, "her robust prose style, [is]composed of dense, powerful imagery, rich vocabularly, gnarled syntax, and sinuous prose rhythms."  In a 1981 interview, she explains her style this way:  "In order to grasp a subject, you need to use all the means at your disposal: the inner narrative, the outer, the reflection on an individual from other people, even the different possibilities of language, the syntax itself, which take hold of different parts of reality."

So don't call the grammar police, the author knows that she is breaking a few of the rules presented by Cornellians, Strunk and White in their classic writing manual, The Elements of Style.  And you won't need the Punctuation Repair Kit in Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves just yet.  But maybe in your First-Year Writing Seminars.

First Impressions

Let’s get to our reading. As you begin the book what captures your attention?  What are your first impressions?

Here are our some of our initial observations.

Wendy:

She receives the book in the mail. Eagerly, tears open the envelope. She is intrigued.

She sits and begins to read.

Huh?

She tries again.

Choppy, disjointed. Incomplete sentences.

Flip to publication information. Is this a badly translated version from another language?

No.

Continue reading.

Ok, slow down. Don’t read so fast.

Crowds flood the city. Julie at the El-Ay Café. Car troubles. Around the corner a mechanic. The mechanic. A moment to remember. The moment before change is put into motion.

What a compelling book! It grabs me from the onset with its unique writing style and the chaos of the busy street and café. Of course, I already know it is my kind of book just from reading the back cover. I am a sucker for contemporary fiction based in far-off countries – India, China, Afghanistan, Ethiopia.

Lance:

It starts with a gesture.

We are told by an omniscient narrator of a woman stuck in traffic: "Her hands thrown up, open." We can imagine her rolling her eyes and voicing her Whatever! as she, Julie, surrenders to the cursing, honking crowd that she has inconvenienced. The story we are about to be told derives from this seemingly inconsequential moment from everyday life.

It starts with her arms.

And his legs. All we can see of Abdu when the two of them first meet are his legs protruding out from under another disabled car. Two halves to be made whole by love? Perhaps.

Is there such a thing as Fate? Julie asks this question, and then she asks Abdu out for coffee. A routine ritual of romance. A safe date. Like most of our mornings and some of our relationships:

It starts with coffee. (p. 10)

Another Country

By placing an epigraph at the beginning of her book, Nadine Gordimer, is introducing and drawing our attention to some of the major themes that we will encounter in our reading. The lines that she uses come from William Plomer's poem, "Another Country." She quotes from a 1936 version of the poem, where we have access to a later and slightly different version published in Plomer's Collected Poems.

The poem begins:

'Let us go to another country,

Not yours or mine,

And start again.'

We have characters that are identified and defined by their genders, ethnicities, religions, and nationalities; characters that will travel and migrate across geographical, political, personal, and psychological borders. Characters that wish to begin new lives in new places.

'Hope would be our passport;

The rest is understood.'

Look for the word understood and its opposite, misunderstood throughout the book. They often appear in close proximity to the words ignorance and innocence. How do we know or how can we understand someone from another culture?

The poem also hints that the new country may not be a place at all, but rather the state of being in love.

Her selection of this author is also significant. William Plomer, was a South African born novelist, poet, biographer, editor, and librettist. He gained international acclaim and South African scorn with his first novel, Turbott Wolfe (1926), which dealt with inter-racial love and marriage.

In her Introduction to the Modern Library edition of this book, Nadine Gordimer writes:

"It is an inexplicable lapse on the part of literary scholars and critics, that Turbott Wolfe is not recognised as a pyrotechnic presence in the canon of renegade colonialist literature along with Conrad. Indeed, William Plomer's astonishing first novel, which first appeared in 1926, ignited a firestorm of controversy in his native South Africa. At the novel's center is Turbott Wolfe, a British trader who opens a general store in Lembuland. He befriends many of his black customers but has less luck ingratiating himself with the bigoted whites who have lived in the area for generations. Eventually, Wolfe and his comrades embrace miscegenation as the key to Africa's future--the Young Africa, where the races have blurred. Provocative and deeply questioning, Turbott Wolfe remains a powerful chronicle of the intimate human consequences of racism."

Picking up The Pickup

By now you should have your copy of The Pickup.  And you may be wondering what is this book about? I don't think this is a novel about a truck, but to what does this title refer?

They say you cannot judge a book by its cover, but what can we glean from our Cornell edition of this book. We see that The Pickup was a New York Times Notable Book in 2002, and that it is recommended for discussion by the Great Books Association.  The citation on the back tells us that the image on the cover is from an untitled painting by artist, Alexander Calder. The abstraction allows us to provide our own interpretations. Perhaps the black and white "objects" are basking or maybe sizzling in the heat of a red desert sun. (Don't we have a red sun on our bookmarks?)

If we look at the cover of the British edition of the book, we see the windshield of a car.  Is this Julie's car that breaks down? Or is it the windshield of a pickup truck? Hmmm.

A search on Google Images for Gordimer and pickup yields two additional images that may help here. There is a cover of a German edition of the book, Ein Man von der Strasse, that pictures an interracial couple.  (Curiously, "the pickup" has been translated into the phrase, "a man from the street.") And then there is Karen Caldicott's drawing of a couple in front of a map of the Middle East from a review of the book in the Seattle-based newspaper, The Stranger.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here are four thousand words to get us started on our reading.

By the way, the Oxford English Dictionary has nine different definitions for a "pick-up." Or pickup. Definition 2.c. does refer to "a small truck or van," but definition 3. is closer to our needs.  It reads, "That which is picked up...one who is picked up, a chance passenger, acquaintance, etc.; spec. a person whose acquaintance is formed with the intention of having a sexual relationship...also the act of forming such an acquaintanceship." So a pickup is a hookup or a friend with privileges. But there may be something more to this relationship than just physical attraction. 

As the blurb on the back cover tells us: "Set in the new South Africa and in an Arab village in the desert, The Pickup is a "masterpiece of creative empathy...a gripping tale of contemporary anguish and unexpected desire, and it opens the Arab world to unusually nuanced perception." (Edward Said).

So pick up the book and let's start reading.