ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the treatment of borders and border zones in two transnational novels, Nadine Gordimer’s 2001 book, The Pickup, and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, published in 2008. A good example is Nadine Gordimer’s novel, The Pickup. In it, Gordimer also weaves location, landscape, migration, and human longing together in a novel that, like Ghosh’s, deals with cultural and political issues through the lens of intimacy, and a romantic longing for the other. Where Gordimer’s novel explores the overlap between Julie and Ibrahim in order to foreground their differences, Aleksandar Hemon uses a similar device in The Lazarus Project to explore many of the same issues Gordimer is concerned with—displacement, cultural conflict, immigration, geopolitical conflict, all in the context of romantic entanglement—but toward a different end. In passages like this The Lazarus Project focuses, as both Tokarczuk’s and Gordimer’s novels do, on transit and flight.
