July 30, 2012

• Week 30: The Pickup

  May left me this book after one of her trips home. I assume she got it at the airport? I don't know. Apparently won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is quite impressive.

  Oh right, I forgot I can no longer have the Amazon book image (or can I?). The book I'm talking about is The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer.

  I glanced at the back of the book for a quick run-down before starting. I usually don't do this, as I don't like to know what's coming up in the plot, but the book basically dropped down on me from out of the blue so...yeah. Based on the back of the book, I thought it was going to be about a girl whose car breaks down and a young man "picks her up" (since her car is broken). But no, that's not what the title refers to at all. It's "pick up" as in when guys say, "Let's go pick up some chicks." Only it's the girl who's doing the picking up, and the guy who is "The Pickup."

  Only, just now I noticed that in orange font, they have the tag line: Who picked up whom? And why?
  And that makes me wonder, because there was something...

  Anyway, the book is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but the sentence structure is free form enough that it actually slowed me down? I had to think about where clauses began and ended, and it was a little annoying. But the story was interesting, and maybe a bit too...easy? Smooth? Even the conflicts seemed rounded on the edges, which was a bit surreal.

  Not sure what it means that this won the Nobel Prize. I haven't read many Nobel Prize winners so I don't have much to compare it to in that sense.

  • 12:05 am
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