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 privileged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in the sleazy street where she meets her Retro-Sixties friends, a young Arab garage mechanic emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. Out of this meeting develops an extraordinary story of unpredictable and relentless emotions that turn on its ...
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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 privileged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in the sleazy street where she meets her Retro-Sixties friends, a young Arab garage mechanic emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. Out of this meeting develops an extraordinary story of unpredictable and relentless emotions that turn on its head each one's notions of the other. No action by either is what the other expects. She insists, against his know-how of the rules of survival, on leaving the country with him when he is deported. The love affair becomes a marriage - that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father's set - but decreed by her 'grease-monkey' (as her friends privately dub him) 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 Western-style countries, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert.
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Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $0.99, very good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2002 by Penguin Group.
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Very Good. . All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business.
Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $0.99, good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2002 by Penguin Group.
Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $1.38, good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Farrar Straus Giroux.
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Good. Former Library book. All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business.
Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $1.45, fair condition, Sold by Gulf Coast Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Cypress, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2002 by Penguin Books.
Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $1.72, fair condition, Sold by Your Online Bookstore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Houston, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Add this copy of The Pickup: a Novel to cart. $2.04, good condition, Sold by Seattle Goodwill rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Seattle, WA, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Picador USA.
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May have some shelf-wear due to normal use. Your purchase funds free job training and education in the greater Seattle area. Thank you for supporting Goodwill's nonprofit mission!
Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $2.17, good condition, Sold by Used Book Company rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Egg Harbor Township, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2002 by Penguin Group.
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Good. Shows minimal signs of wear and previous use. Can include minimal notes/highlighting. A portion of your purchase benefits nonprofits! -Note: Edition & format may differ from what is shown in stock photo & item details. May not include supplementary material (toys, access code, dvds, etc).
Add this copy of The Pickup to cart. $2.26, very good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
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Very Good. . All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business.
Add this copy of The Pickup: a Novel to cart. $2.29, good condition, Sold by Once Upon A Time Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Tontitown, AR, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Picador.
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This is a used book in good condition and may show some signs of use or wear. This is a used book in good condition and may show some signs of use or wear.
Add this copy of Pickup to cart. $2.47, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Picador USA.
This book examines the push and pull of cultures on those in it and those entering. The reader cares about the man in the woman at the center of the story, and many of the family members on both sides were drawn lovingly.
iheartabbi13
Aug 5, 2010
A good read
The style is intriguing, it reminds me of a lesser version of Disgrace. I enjoyed it nonetheless.
rejoyce
Oct 2, 2007
Forms of Unknowing
Nobel Prize awardee Nadine Gordimer's career has always been consonant with the fate of her native country, South Africa. She brings an acute intelligence and sensibility to delineating the human relationships between her black and white South African characters in masterful novels such as Burger's Daughter and A Sport of Nature. In The Pickup, the central relationship between a woman of privilege and an Arab garage mechanic, who is also an illegal immigrant, becomes symbolic of the uneasy bond between Islam and the West, and the mutual forms of unknowing. In this late novel, Gordimer's use of present tense and her clipped, convoluted sentences mirror the couple's uncertainties, ignorances, withholdings, and differences. While the prose lacks the sensuous abundance of the earlier novels, it is one of her most compelling. Gordimer's understanding of social relations between those who "own" and those seeking an "alternative" is quite uncanny.
