The Conservationist: Booker Prize Winner

by Nadine Gordimer

"This is a novel of enormous power' New Statesman 'Gordimer is a great writer ... It is Turgenev that she most brings to mind' -- New York Review of BooksThe Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine GordimerMehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

Genres: Fiction, Africa, South Africa, Nobel Prize, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction

271 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer, political activist, and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity".

Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.

Reviews

[Federico DN · Rating 1 out of 5]

Money doesn't buy happiness, and happiness doesn't buy safety.

During the South Africa's apartheid period, "Mehring" is one of many white business men, industrialist, powerful, very wealthy. In a sudden lordship impulse he acquires a country house, to escape the city on weekends. His life revolves around the job and the coming and goings to the country house. A great empty house, an incipient harvest, the people working the land, an estranged ex-wife, an alienated son, business, lovers. And the country house, always the damned country house. And the sudden appearance of a dead man in the fields, that nobody cares about.

An excessively boring 300p novel, that could maybe have created a lot more impact if they had been only fifty, just telling the beginning and the end. Everything else seemed almost superfluous. I have never dnf a book, but I really really wanted to with this one.

One of those yellowed books you sometimes find in the old family book shelf. Curiosity didn't kill the cat, just me this time.

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PERSONAL NOTE :
[1974] [336p] [Fiction] [EXTREMELY Not Recommendable]
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El dinero no compra felicidad, y la felicidad no compra seguridad.

Durante el período del apartheid de Africa del Sur, "Mehring" es uno de tantos hombres blancos de negocios, industrial, poderoso, muy acaudalado. En un impulso de señor feudal adquiere una finca para escapar de la ciudad los fines de semana. Su vida transcurre entre el trabajo y las idas y vueltas hacia la finca. Una gran casa desierta, una incipiente cosecha, la gente que trabaja la tierra, una ex esposa distante, un hijo alienado, negocios, amantes. Y la bendita finca, siempre la bendita finca. Y la misteriosa aparición de un muerto en los campos, que a nadie le importa.

Una aburridísima novela de casi 300p, que tal hubiera generado mucho mayor impacto si hubieran sido tan sólo cincuenta contando el principio y el final. Todo lo demás resulta prácticamente supérfluo. Nunca dejé un libro sin terminar, pero tuve muchas muchas ganas de abandonar éste.

Amarillentos libros que a veces uno encuentra en la vieja biblioteca familiar. La curiosidad no mató al gato, sólo a mí esta vez.

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NOTA PERSONAL :
[1974] [336p] [Ficción] [EXTREMADAMENTE No Recomendable]
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[Samadrita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do not let the sea of 3-stars fool you into decrying the unpleasantness or the apparent plotlessness of this novel.
Not all of us read for pleasure after all. Besides it is an achievement of extraordinary proportions when an author manages to stretch the 'show don't tell' narrative device almost to the breaking point yet never failing to accentuate the core themes so realistically.

Nadine Gordimer puts her reader in a trance-like state with her hypnotic, lyrical descriptions of minutiae in an unstable world which is perenially straddling the line of divide between outright revolution and a kind of perilous peace. She breathes so much life into the landscape that it manages to appear far more humanly than the protagonist who claims its ownership.

There are discomfiting images galore seen through the eyes of Mehring, an opportunistic white farm-owner and businessman - hippos frolicking about in the murky waters of marshes who abort their foetuses sensing an impending drought, cows listlessly grazing about a farm peopled by inhabitants of different races and ambiguous allegiances, black children running about the veld snot dripping from their noses who are so carelessly mentioned in passing that they are taken to be closer in kinship with stray animals than humans, a dead body left to decay underneath water reeds by a lax administration, odious sexual encounters between strangers on a plane - which are potent enough to induce nausea in the reader and reinforce the unnaturalness of a South Africa under Apartheid.

"They were useless against the possibility - always present - of a visit from some official, investigator, inspector: many titles that all amounted to the same thing: a white man with the right to serve an eviction order. [ ]...he came in the name of law, there was no defence to keep him out. He must not be antagonized: the only way was roundabout."

The uncomfortable status quo which Mehring, his black workers and a group of Indians, who conduct business on the fringes of the farm, construct their lives around has much to do with the fact that Ms Gordimer wrote this at a time when the Anti-Apartheid movement had lost steam and its greatest hero was languishing in prison. Thus almost every impeccably crafted sentence is heavily impregnated with metaphors, allusions and analogies and so even a split second of lapse in attention can pose a crucial hindrance toward understanding.The violence and injustice that simmers just beneath the surface of the narrative is not just readily palpable but often threatens to spill over in to the realm of current reality.

Mehring, a despicable man in every sense of the term, seems to be caught up in an existential crisis aside from being trapped in a prison of his own making. He is the perfect representative of a cog in the wheel of Apartheid, a white Capitalist who doesn't doubt the sanctity of a social order in which the Africans and Indians are placed on rungs significantly beneath the white man's and believes himself to be a benevolent and just 'master'. But even so he appears to be enveloped by a sense of growing unease and is keenly aware of a prickling reminder of his assured everyday existence being nothing more than a portentous lull before the storm.

He is the titular conservationist of a contrived arrangement which is already starting to come apart at the seams and which will inevitably crumble to dust one day. But it is as if he almost knows his efforts at denial are futile which is why his inner world is thrown into a steadily deepening turmoil with each passing day. The proof of this can be found in Mehring's stream of consciousness degenerating into sporadic bursts of incoherence in the denouement.
His downward spiral, thus, subtly alludes to the the chinks in the armour of the political establishment and augurs its future demise.

"Yes, that's the deal, the hopeful reasoning of the impotence of your kind, of those who are powerless to establish their millenium. The only way to shut you up is to establish the other, the only millenium, of the body, invade you with the easy paradise that truly knows no distinction of colour, creed and what-not..."

I find it a wee bit disheartening to notice so few readers picking up a Gordimer book these days. Not only is her Nobel win highly deserved in the light of all her literary activism in the backdrop of Apartheid but she nurtured an ambitious vision of dissecting the power imbalance in race relations from so many dissimilar points of view and brought it to fruition so masterfully.

My reading of this couldn't have come at a more opportune time given South Africa is celebrating 20 years of democracy with the recent frenzy around its general elections. Here's to hoping interest in Ms Gordimer's work is revived on this momentous occasion.

[Fionnuala]

A good story, competently told, can’t be faulted. But ‘good’ is sometimes not enough. We might want more than that. We might want a story to carry an impact, not only on us but also on its own subject matter, the time it was set in, the land it describes, the politics of that time.
The Conservationist carries such an impact. It hits us in the soft part of our bodies beneath the sternum, winding us, leaving us doubled in two, coughing and gasping. And it hits us early and often. There is no let-up. It hits our liberal notions as well as our conservative ones, our philanthropic impulses as well as our patronising ones. It questions the idea of land ownership and land use, confirming in the end that land belongs to those who live on it, and to those who lie in it after they are dead.

So not just competent but well told, this good story, well-told in every way. Gordimer’s words carry a visual quality so that the scenes play out before our eyes as if in a movie:
The shop was empty after Jacobus's clumsy shape sauntered out of the light of the door
Or this:
The house behind him was dark; on each window a sun, rouged with smoke and dust, slipped down the glass.
Or again:
He has tipped back the chair and feels the moonlight on his left cheek as if tanning in some strange sun.
More:
Dust has the effect on his distant hills of a pencil sketch gone over by a soft rubber

And yet the story is almost entirely one long interior monologue, thinking as a form of conversation, as the main character puts it. For much of the book, we are inside the roomy head of Mehring, a successful entrepreneur, a would-be farmer, a misguided conservationist, an old bull, always alone. Mehring has been the entitled predator of everything he came in contact with in his life and it really ought to be hell being inside Mehring’s head. But no, it’s more than comfortable; Mehring is not an alien. His thoughts are our thoughts even if in different contexts. And he is more honest than many of us.

In this book, the fortunate are those who get to lie in a field of shining lucerne by a flowing river for ever and ever. Others, just like the giant peace sign painted on the side of a water tank by a hopeful teenager, end up face-down in the mud on the side of a highway. Such is natural justice, and for all his faults, Mehring understands that message better than anyone.

.......................................................................................................

This book was written in the early seventies when John Vorster was prime minister of South Africa and the anti-apartheid movement had temporarily lost momentum; the book reflects the upheavals of that time perfectly. Gordimer herself resisted apartheid and all forms of discrimination and segregation throughout her life even refusing to accept being shortlisted for the Orange Prize, an award that recognizes only women writers. I cheered when I heard that.
I'm not recommending that you read this book; you readers all have your own agendas and I never seek to influence others. But I do want you to know that this shining book exists, and that it holds many, many truths beneath its layers. That’s enough.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've read Mantel's Wolf Hall, you know there's a bit of adjustment at first once you realize "he" almost always refers to Cromwell because you're inside his head. Such is the case here, though the reader is granted a reprieve now and then when an omniscient voice takes over in some chapters. I say reprieve because it's tough being in Mehring's head and I felt relief when he engaged in dialogue (not that often) with someone other than himself.

Inside his head, the reader also needs to determine who the "you" is that Mehring is remembering and having imaginary conversations with. Mostly it's with his polar-opposite, leftist married lover (Mehring himself is divorced and seems to have had various flings, many unseemly) whom he's helped to flee the country, but at other times it's with his long-haired, barefoot sixteen-year-old hippie son Terry (the book was published in 1972). When they're together, Mehring struggles for topics to converse with Terry; when they're apart, Mehring thinks of the many things he should've said, but we all know how that goes: in your thoughts you control the other's responses. Mehring sometimes switches from one "you" to the other within the same paragraph; once the "you" has been established and sentences reread, meaning becomes easier.

Mehring is a rich white powerful industrialist who owns a luxury flat in the city and four-hundred acres in the country. He's spending more and more time in the country, a place he previously visited only on the weekends and originally envisioned as a love nest. He's become possessive of the land, though "his" black farm workers' abodes could do with some upgrading, of course:

With a new roof, it would be a better house than any of them has at the compound, but that's out of the question because he has discovered, coming there in the evenings, it has the best view of any spot on the whole farm.

The harshness of nature reaps danger (especially for those without resources) but also beauty, and Mehring believes the latter will always win out. This conservationist not only wants to keep his life (and land) the way it is, he increasingly wants it all for himself.

From the opening pages, he and the novel are haunted by the corpse of a murdered black man discovered in Mehring's third pasture. Not caring who committed the murder of a black man, the police bury the man near where he has been found. Mehring's anxious, claustrophobic (for the reader) thoughts return to the burial site over and over, as do thoughts of a missing ring, lost by his lover as she visited the property with him before he'd bought it.

The results of a flood brought on by a cyclone are described thoroughly and as I read those passages yesterday -- on the ninth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina -- the words rang true for my area too:

Hanks of grass, hanks of leaves and dead tree-limbs, hanks of slime, of sand, and always hanks of mud, have been currented this way and that by an extraordinary force that has rearranged a landscape as a petrified wake.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting story about a millionaire South African who buys a 400 acre farm near Johannesburg in the apartheid era. The main character made his money in the mineral world and is bit like a duck out of water. Splitting his time between his flat in the city and the farm.

Mehring visits the farm as a way to escape from his stressful life. However, one day he finds a dead man on his farm, there is no investigation by the police and he is who is buried without fanfare. This whole experience begins to haunt him.

The seasons reflect the changes not only on the farm but also in his life. A fire damages the reeds and willows. In parallel he helps his mistress escape SA. His son Terry also goes to America to visit Mehring’s ex-wife. His relationship with his son is strained and this is reflected in their interactions.

There are also sub plots with Jacobus the black overseer managing the farm and trying to get as much as he can. An Indian family also lives in a prison like fortress store where they face possible eviction due to their status. All the stories reflect the different classes and also a helplessness. Although Mehring is rich he is miserable and sees his life as not the success it is on the surface.

The book was written when the antiapartheid movement had lost its way and Mandela was in prison. The sheer breathtaking stupidity of the apartheid system is evident. Her writing captures the apparent normalcy the whites mostly accept the system and the seething tension and turmoil threatening to erupt from the oppressed classes.

The ending is to me ambiguous.

[Karen·]

-Why not just buy it and leave it as it is?...
If I had your money I'd buy it and leave it just as it is.-
-No farm is beautiful unless it's productive.-
-You hear these things and believe them because they sound 'right'. That's your morality.-
The flirtatious sneer in her voice unexpectedly gave him an erection. (Even then perhaps? ...the beginning of these - inappropriate - reactions now, being pecked on the cheek by some child he's known since she was in napkins.)
-And what's yours my dear? You're so concerned about those pot-bellied piccanins on the way here, don't you think land ought to be growing food?-
He knew all the answers she could have given, knew them by heart, had heard them mouthed by her kind a hundred times: On starvation wages? For whose benefit? For your profit? Or your loss, in a bad year, to reduce your supertax? But she decided to play culpable...
-Yes I know - I know. I want to change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself. If I had your money...-
...
What is it they think they can have? What do they think's available? Peace, Happiness and Justice? To be achieved by pretty women and schoolboys? The millennium? By people who want good respectable company lawyers?
Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself - who wouldn't make the world over if it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomeach to ignore - dead and hidden - what intrudes.

Mehring, (speaking name: increasing, making more) rich pig-iron man, has a hobby farm 25 miles outside the city, shows more concern for 'his' guinea fowl than the snotty nosed, coughing, malnourished children of his farm workers in the compound. There is something dead and hidden on his land, which he manages to ignore. We are inside his head - we hear his thoughts, we hear his conversations - mind the dash -, questioning his ex-mistress, his son, the activist, the objector, those who see change coming, know it must come, even if they do not want the storm to hit them, and escape, escape to London, to New York.
Mehring is used to taking, and he goes on taking. Women, girls. (They want it really).
Mehring is blind, and continues to be blind. Jakobus does not think that a night spent with the baas is the best night of his life, oh no.
A battle cry of one of the banned liberation movements in South Africa was mayibuye, “Africa, come back." First fire, then flood bring back what was buried. Africa, come back.

The narrative is disconcerting, swirling in and out, sometimes internal, sometimes external, Mehring addresses sometimes his mistress, sometimes his son, sometimes changing so abruptly between the two that it is hard to keep up. Go back, look again, look again. The whole is undermined and undercut by epigraphs from a quite different narrative, from The Religious System of the Amazulu. And does this sound like a historical, political tract, worthy but dull? Oh but it shouldn't sound that way. Such sensual, such sensuous writing. Colours, smells, sounds. Silver and gold. And deep, lovely black.

[Sarah Curnow · Rating 1 out of 5]

I MADE myself keep reading this despite not particularly enjoying it and finding it frustration. There is a review on Amazon which summed it up for me "I read every boring word on every boring page of this boring, boring book - and only because my mission is to read every Booker prize winner. Otherwise, I would have hurled this book into the bin after twenty pages. NOTHING HAPPENS, except a tedious interior monologue from someone about whom you constantly think 'who cares?' To add insult to injury, the punctuation makes it almost impossible to follow what is going on. Even if Gordimer holds her readers in such contempt, at least her publisher should have ensured that the small concession of making the work readable would be a good idea.
If I could give negative numbers of stars for this book, I would."

Ha!

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel to admire, to tremble in sheer awe at the power of Gordimer's language, her mastery of sensuality, and the importance of its themes: the skewering of apartheid during a time when the anti-apartheid movement floundered, leaderless and without much will (early-mid 1970s). It is a tough novel to love. I felt alienated by the dense language and the stream-of-consciousness writing and frustration at being trapped inside Mehring's morally bankrupt brain. Which of course is the paradox of this brilliant, difficult novel: Mehring represents white South Africa and to see the world through his eyes, as we do in The Conservationist, is to trap the other characters--black, Indian, women--in a kind of subordinate, pitiful stasis. Nadine Gordimer deliberately holds us at arm's length as Mehring considers the human world around him, but draws us in close when showing us the land.

Shortly after book opens on Mehring's country farm, twenty-five miles outside Johannesburg, the corpse of a black man is discovered by the river. No one knows who he is or how he died. The local authorities simply bury the man where he is, promising to collect the body later and investigate. Mehring is a bit put out at first, thinking of that dead body on his property, but after a while, the man troubles him much less than the hippos who abort their fetuses in the river, signs of a worsening drought.

Mehring purchased this farm as a tax write-off and as a weekend fancy. It isn't terribly productive, but he doesn't need the income--he's a mining executive. The land and its cattle are tended by a collection of black families and undocumented workers who drift over from nearby shanty towns. Mehring holds dominion over so much land-conquering its underground during his day job; plucking at its veldt on the weekends. He is apolitical, bored, lonely, a beneficiary of a society built on the backs of the oppressed. His wife has left him, as has his mistress. His son flees to Namibia--a nation-state seeking independence from South Africa-- to escape compulsory military service. To keep himself company, Mehring flirts with sexual predation, all the while imagining himself above the cocktails-and-flirtations of South Africa's smart set. He really is despicable. God. But again, the genius of Gordimer is that you are inside Mehring's head, and of course he sees himself as enlightened and obliging--even a young girl sitting next to him on the plane opens her legs and allows his fingers inside. What was he supposed to do? Opportunity for the white man is everywhere, just for the taking.

The land has the final say. Biblical rains and flood end Mehring's farm fancies. The flood returns the body of a slain man to the surface, to be buried properly. But it would take another twenty years after the publication of The Conservationist for the flood of public opinion and political will to end the shame of apartheid.

The Conservationist won the Booker prize; it was also banned in South Africa. Rich in allegory, description, nuance, and psychology, it makes for disturbing, difficult reading.

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am ambivalent about this book.

On the one hand, it had some brilliant parts. The overall themes of apartheid are incredibly subtle but powerful. Many of the passages are very poetic and evocative. At the end I could honestly say that I felt I'd been through a good experience. She does a great job showing the awkward relationship between Mehring and his black workers. The dead man found at the beginning haunts the rest of the novel--and it works brilliantly.

On the other hand, most of the time I read it I was annoyed by what to me felt like an over self-indulgent, self-conscious style. I felt like I was at one of those poetry readings where the poet is reading the poem entitled something like "A purple evening on the hood of my 1965 Mustang with the engine turned off thinking about existentialism while the moon rose over the hills to the East: A Reverie"--the kind of writing that lays out details in a way not meant to be descriptive but to sound profound, even when they are not. It doesn't help that she starts a chapter "Golden reclining nudes of the desert." It's there at the beginning, one line, with a break between it and the next paragraph. I'm just not into this kind of writing. I enjoy a more simple, understated style.

I'm sure a lot of this was just my approach to the novel, but I couldn't help feel like the narrator was drolling on and on in this way, enunciating alliteration and assonance to show how clever it was. I was most touched by the simple passages, not by the ones that were obviously worked and reworked to have a rhythm that screams at the reader--look at this rhythm!

This is just my personal taste. I don't want to discourage anyone about this novel. I feel awfully pretentious saying all of that about a Booker Prize winner, let alone about a Nobel Prize winner. Griping about style in a book of obvious substantive value is a probably petty. Gordimer's writing is important. She has been incredibly progressive with her portrayals of race, and this book was one of those important works. Unfortunatlely, this particular book felt dated to me. The Best of the Booker judges have a bit different taste than I do--I didn't feel like this book really made it out of the early 1980s.

For my complete review, please visit my blog, The Mookse and the Gripes.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading like a series of impressions, the disjointed narrative style is counterbalanced by the ethereal imagery which Gordimer conjures up; whether it be the stifling, suffocating South African heat or the rambunctious river torrents, Gordimer conjures up a South Africa which appears to be spiralling towards violence, a South Africa seen mainly through the eyes of Mehring; an empty vessel of a man whose inner self is nothing more than a hodge-podge of greed and venality, a man who seems to be perpetually on the point of mental disorientation.

Mehring it emotionally distant from those around him, he finds it difficult to form anything other than superficial connections with others; his emotionally empty relationship with a married women, his sneering condescending of his black farm workers, his tense relationship with (in his eyes) effete son, Mehring exists as a ghost, haunting those around him, lugubrious and leering, walking beneath the blood orange moon or the hazy winter morning;

“It’s a cataract over the fierce eye of the sun; it’s even possible, some days, to look straight at the sun as if you are staring at the prism deep in the under-water radiance of a star sapphire”

The disorientation brought about by Mehring’s gradual mental breakdown continues to seep into the novel. Mehring is in many ways the atypical white, conservative South African man of his age, a man solely concerned with power and money and whose narrow-minded views reflect the prejudices engendered by his privilege. ‘The Conservationist’ is a flawed, if original and often poetic exploration of the mindset behind men whose ignorance and greed perpetuated the societal inequalities of South Africa.

[Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me the novel was a window into a world I did not understand. I felt her prose was excellent. I can still recall many strong moments in the book. The romantic elements were well done.

[David Sasaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that college professors love to assign to their undergrads. Similar to Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz , in which Artemio's life and death serve as metaphors for the historic arc of the Mexican Revolution and the corrupt PRI party it spawned, the anti-hero of The Conservationist is Gordimer's metaphor for a South Africa apartheid system that is impossible to conserve despite the wishes of its White population.

In fact, I'm sure there is some college undergrad out there who is writing a paper about Gordimer's imagery of the colonial aesthetic of non-native plants destroying the sacred bond between native Africans and the local flora and fauna. But what is impressive about Gordimer - and what I think she'll always be remembered for - is her ability to write so seemingly effortlessly from the male, female, Black, White, and Indian voice. Sometimes she even seems more comfortable writing as a man than a woman (always stressing that men have no rational control over their sexual compulsions).



Mithcell Park, Durban

I bought the book from a used bookshop on Florida Road in the Morningside neighborhood of Durban. Two blocks up is Mitchell Park where each night wealthy White South Africans in lycra and workout suits go jogging and speed-walking with dogs the size of horses. Across the street is Vida e Caffe where the same couples and groups of friends gather each morning to catch up over their first cup of coffee. The whole area is a slice of Europe spooned up and put down on Durban's best plot of land.

While walking around the neighborhood and reading The Conservationist I had the sense that South Africa's battle for and against Apartheid had less to do with power and more to do with taste. So long as the garden aesthetic - the boutiques, the cafes, the wine bars - of South Africa's best neighborhoods isn't threatened, most White South Africans are able to endure the idea of a Black ruling class.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1974, The Conservationist is set in apartheid-era South Africa. Its protagonist, Mehring, is a wealthy white industrialist who owns a farm outside Johannesburg. Despite owning the farm, Mehring remains fundamentally disconnected and it functions mostly as a weekend retreat and status symbol. The land is worked by black laborers whose lives and struggles he barely acknowledges. One of the novel's most memorable elements is the discovery of an unidentified black man's body on Mehring's property, which is promptly buried with no investigation. The corpse is a reminder of the violence underlying Mehring's comfortable existence.

His relationships with the black workers on his farm are paternalistic. He believes himself to be benevolent, even generous. He experiences moments of genuine concern and even guilt, but these feelings are consistently undermined by his inability to see beyond his own perspective. This perspective allows readers to access Mehring's thoughts, which creates an uncomfortable intimacy with his racist assumptions and self-justifications. The book excels at portraying how oppressive systems are maintained through actions of individuals who don't see themselves as oppressors. Though this book was written five decades ago, it remains relevant to contemporary topics of systemic racism and historical injustice.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*. Restarted this novel after taking a 4 month break and while I didn’t always enjoy it, happy to have finally read. Dense, allegorical and definitely needs to be read closely and with reflection to appreciate the whole.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in South Africa just before the anti-Apartheid uprising, this novel of one English speaking white man is symbolic of the inevitable collapse of this unjust system. This is a smart book, brilliant dialogue, impressionistic descriptions, strong prose, a book that respects the intelligence of the reader. This is one of those books that I can appreciate while not enjoying. For the protagonist, women are for his sexual desires, blacks are for his service, creation is for his pleasure, wealth is for his hording. He is so unaware of his arrogance that he gave the reader no point for sympathy or understanding. I suspect that Gordimer modeled him after many she knew in her homeland, but for me he was flattened by his vulgar attitudes and actions. I loved the ending. It was the key that unlocked the rest of the novel for me.

[Jayne Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled with this. It needs to be read slowly, analysed line by line to tease out the meaning, and I really tried to stay with it but in end the current pulled me under.

It's a tale of farming in South Africa, of pig iron, of differing standards of living and of questionable goings-on under aircraft blankets. Told in a series of random though patterns that's only just this side of James Joyce, it's difficult to work out what is happening at any given time, who is talking and who they are talking to. It reminded me of those weird posters in vogue during the early '90s that seemed to depict nothing at all until you relaxed your eyes and looked 'through' them and they suddenly resolved themselves into a 3D image. There were occasional flashes of lucidity in which I could tell why this author is so highly acclaimed. Mostly, however, it just seemed like a jumble of abstract thought.

I know there must be layer upon layer of allegory in this book but it doesn't matter how beautiful the water is if you're drowning in it. I was hoping to learn more about South African society, and when better to do so than while we're all watching it on the World Cup. In the end, I fear only literary eggheads will gain knowledge from this book. Like the apartheid system itself, I was profoundly glad when it came to an end.

[Andrew]

To quote Homer Simpson as he watched Twin Peaks:

“Brilliant. I have no idea what's going on.”

The Conservationist is a much, much less straightforward book than July's People, and at times is this just totally weird stream of consciousness, the sort of thing that could alienate a lot of readers. I was enthralled, absolutely enthralled. There's a dead body, the politics of apartheid, and wave after wave of inclement weather and societal malaise. Gordimer comes off almost as this Eastern European or French writer who somehow wound up in the terrain of South Africa. Totally fucking bizarre, totally awesome, but I won't really know what it all “means” until I reread it somewhere down the line.

[Baran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich denk ich muss das Buch nochmal lesen, ich denk ich hab paar Dinge vercheckt.

[Μιχάλης Παπαχατζάκης · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ηθικό δίδαγμα: επειδή ένα βιβλίο πήρε κορυφαίο βραβείο (το "Booker") δεν σημαίνει ότι είναι και φοβερό. Ο «Συντηρητής» είναι το πρώτο εδώ και πολλά χρόνια βιβλίο που έφτασα στο αμήν να το παρατήσω στην μέση. Δεν το έκανα με την προσδοκία ότι κάτι καλό θα προκύψει στη συνέχεια. Βασικά είναι ένα μυθιστόρημα όπου δεν συμβαίνει ουσιαστικά τίποτα, οι περιγραφές είναι βαρετές και εξαντλητικές -τόσο των σκέψεων όσο και των πραγμάτων- οι διάλογοι μπερδεμένοι ως προς το ποιος μιλάει, η αλληγορία πολύ καλά κρυμμένη (μάλλον γι' αυτήν κέρδισε το βραβείο), η πλοκή μπερδεμένη.

Η ιστορία είναι ότι ένας νοτιοαφρικάνος λευκός στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του '70 αγοράζει για φορολογικούς λόγους ένα κτήμα λίγα χιλιόμετρα έξω απ' το Γιοχάνεσμπουργκ. Ο Μέρινγκ (έτσι λέγεται) δεν ασχολείται με τη γη αυτή. Τη δουλεύουν μαύροι και βασικά ο επιστάτης του ο Ιάκωβος. Ο Μέρινγκ δεν έχει φίλους, έχει γιο που τον εγκαταλείπει για να ζήσει με την μάνα του (που μάλλον κι αυτή τον εγκατέλειψε πιο πριν), αλλά και για να γλυτώσει τον στρατό, έχει νεαρή ερωμένη που δεν καταλαβαίνει (εκείνη δραστηριοποιείται πολιτικά κατά του Απαρτχάιντ), είναι ένας μεσοαστός γκρίζος συντηρητικός. Αδιαφορεί ουσιαστικά για όλα αυτά που έχουν κάποια αξία στη ζωή. Ζει μια μίζερη ζωή. Η μιζέρια αυτή παρέσυρε και τη συγγραφέα.

Η Γκόρντιμερ δίνει εικόνες του Απαρτχάιντ, τη θέση των μαύρων, των ινδών, των αγγλόφωνων λευκών και των αφρικάνερς (απόγονοι των ολλανδών αποίκων). Η γη για τις δυο τελευταίες κατηγορίες δεν έχει την αξία που έχει για τις πρώτες. Είναι «περιουσία». Ο Μέρινγκ είναι τοποθετημένος σ' αυτήν την ιεραρχία σε καλή θέση, αλλά στην πραγματικότητα είναι μίζερος και βαρετός. Δυστυχώς και όλες σχεδόν οι παράγραφοι του βιβλίου.

«Δεν υπάρχει ψυχή τριγύρω. Είναι δικό του το μέρος. Κανένα μάτι δεν τον παρακολουθεί. Σαν κάθε υγιές πλάσμα, που βρίσκεται ακόμα στην ακμή του, κάθεται ανακούρκουδα στο ιδιωτικό αγροτεμάχιο του γλυκού υγρού τριφυλλιού και παράγει, με ευκολία και με αρκετή ευχαρίστηση (το πουράκι που δεν ανάψει το προηγούμενο βράδυ κρέμεται αναμμένο στο στόμα του), μια αχνιστή κουράδα. Η ζέστη της μυρωδιά, εδώ έξω, στην ύπαιθρο, έχει την αθωότητα της κοπριάς. Κλωτσάει από πάνω λίγο χώμα και φύλλα και θάβει το αποδεικτικό αυτό στοιχείο του εαυτού του.» (σελ.244)

Καλή η περιγραφή του χεσίματος, αλλά...
Πάντως, ο Μέρινγκ είναι μεν ρατσιστής, αλλά όχι ακραίος. Είναι επειδή γεννήθηκε σ' αυτό το περιβάλλον:

«Ωστόσο υπερβάλλει ο Μέρινγκ όταν αναφέρει σε επαγγελματικά γεύματα (ακούει μερικές φορές τον εαυτό του) ότι ο γέρο-μαύρος του είναι καλύτερος από οποιονδήποτε καλό επιστάτη. Στην πραγματικότητα εννοεί πως οι μαύροι είναι πιο έντιμοι από οποιονδήποτε λευκό που θα δεχόταν να αναλάβει ένα τόσο υπεύθυνο πόστο με τόσο χαμαλίκι. Ο Ιάκωβος μπορεί να ξαφρίσει ένα σάκο με καλαμποκάλευρο για να βγάλει κανένα φράγκο παραπάνω, και γιατί όχι, ποιος δεν θα το έκανε- αλλά δεν έχει την ικανότητα να σε εξαπατήσει.» (σελ.167)

Καλές οι προθέσεις, αλλά πολύ κουραστικό μυθιστόρημα.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, and I have to admit—it left me unsettled, but in a way that lingered long after I closed the book. Published in 1974, this novel is often praised as one of Gordimer’s finest works, winning the Booker Prize that same year.

I had heard of the book for years, but reading it now, in quiet moments of reflection, made me realize just how subtle, yet sharp, Gordimer’s observations are about South Africa, apartheid, and human nature.

At the heart of the novel is Mehring, a wealthy white industrialist who buys a farm outside Johannesburg. On the surface, he is a man of success, prestige, and influence.

But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that his wealth and property cannot shield him from the hollowness that marks his life. To Mehring, the farm represents power, control, and the illusion of permanence—a place where he can leave a mark, a legacy, and call himself a “conservationist.”

But this conservation is only skin-deep. The land is not alive for him; it is a trophy, a status symbol. Mehring’s interactions with the farmworkers, with his estranged family, and even with the land itself are superficial. He does not see or understand them, and in many ways, the book becomes a meditation on what it means to belong—or fail to belong—to a place, a society, or even one’s own life.

The discovery of a Black man’s body buried somewhere on the farm is one of the book’s most haunting moments. The authorities treat it almost casually, and it struck me how Gordimer used this moment to make a moral statement about apartheid.

Black lives, in the society she depicts, are devalued, erased, and taken for granted. Mehring cannot see the corpse for what it represents, nor does he understand the deeper truths of the land he claims to “conserve.” The irony is painful: he wants to preserve, yet life itself slips through his fingers.

The corpse becomes more than just a plot device—it is a silent, persistent reminder that history and justice are not controlled by wealth or ownership.

Mehring’s personal life mirrors this detachment. His relationships are empty and transactional. His son resents him, his wife is distant, and his encounters with women feel hollow.

Even the people who work the land, who sustain it, do so with quiet tolerance, never respect, never true connection. Reading these sections, I felt a creeping sense of alienation—not just Mehring’s, but a broader one that Gordimer seems to be pointing to in society itself. The book isn’t just about one man; it is about the disconnect between privilege and responsibility, between perception and reality.

What I found fascinating—and sometimes challenging—was Gordimer’s writing style. Her prose is dense and lyrical, sometimes wandering into stream-of-consciousness, shifting between Mehring’s thoughts and the world around him. At first, it felt disorienting, but soon I realised that this very fragmentation mirrors Mehring’s own fragmented life.

The farm becomes a living metaphor: lush, chaotic, and alive, yet experienced by Mehring only through the narrow lens of control and ownership. I found myself slowing down, savouring certain passages, and noticing the subtlety in her observations of human behaviour and the natural world. She writes about the land in a way that feels almost spiritual, contrasting sharply with Mehring’s shallow materialism.

Apartheid and the racial division of South Africa are never just backdrops. They are the soil in which the story grows, shaping every relationship and power dynamic. The land belongs to Black people historically and spiritually, yet is owned and exploited by whites.

Mehring is oblivious to this truth, and through his ignorance, Gordimer exposes the moral and ethical failures of the privileged class. Even the “conservation” he claims to practice becomes a cruel irony, revealing how self-interest can masquerade as stewardship.

I was particularly struck by how Gordimer conveys tension without traditional action or suspense. There is no dramatic chase, no loud confrontation. Yet every page is filled with unease—the subtle awareness of injustice, the looming presence of the dead man, and the ethical and emotional disconnection that colours every interaction. Reading it, I felt both immersed and slightly off-balance, as if the narrative itself were a landscape I had to navigate carefully.

One of the aspects I appreciated most was how Gordimer juxtaposes Mehring’s material success with his emotional emptiness. The wealth, the land, the power—they cannot shield him from the isolation and moral blindness that define his life.

There is a quiet, devastating beauty in the way Gordimer shows this: it’s not loud or preachy, but it cuts deeper than any overt critique. The novel becomes almost meditative, asking readers to consider what it truly means to be connected—to land, to people, to history—and what it costs when that connection is absent.

Mortality, legacy, and inheritance are woven through the narrative. Mehring’s obsession with leaving a mark, controlling the land, and being remembered seems petty in the grand scheme of life. The Black labourers’ ongoing relationship with the land—what they nurture, what they sustain—emerges as a truer form of continuity. This contrast left me thinking long after I finished the book: ownership is temporary, wealth is transient, but life and history persist in ways beyond the individual.

By the final chapters, I realised that The Conservationist is not just a critique of apartheid South Africa—it is a profound exploration of human consciousness, ethical responsibility, and the illusions of control. Gordimer forces readers to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and moral complexity, refusing easy answers or neat resolutions.

Mehring remains a flawed, sometimes unsympathetic protagonist, but through him, the book illuminates larger truths about society and the self.

Ultimately, reading The Conservationist was both challenging and rewarding. Gordimer’s prose demands attention, but it also rewards patience with insights into alienation, privilege, and moral blindness. The novel lingers, haunting the reader in ways that are subtle yet profound. It reminds me that literature’s power often lies not just in storytelling, but in its ability to reflect human complexity and ethical dilemmas.

Even now, days after finishing, I find myself thinking about the farm, the buried man, and Mehring’s futile attempts to “preserve” life and order. Gordimer’s writing stays with you—quietly insistent, morally precise, and deeply human.

The Conservationist is not a book that rushes to entertain; it is a book that insists you confront truths about yourself, about society, and about the legacy we inherit and leave behind.

For any reader willing to engage fully, this novel is a masterpiece—not just for its critique of apartheid, but for its profound meditation on life, ownership, and human connection.

It is, in every sense, a work that rewards patience, reflection, and careful attention to the quiet, often overlooked truths of existence.

[Thomas Tibbetts · Rating 5 out of 5]

So Nadine Gordimer is a legend actually

[Julie]

8.5/10

[Jelte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wat een boek.

Ik vond het in mijn boekenkast terwijl ik wachtte op een roman die ik had besteld. Afgaande op de naam die erin staat geschreven heb ik het ooit eens uit de boekenkast van mijn ouders ge-ehm-leend. Die kochten het in 1979, 5 jaar nadat het was bekroond met de Booker Prize.

En boy oh boy wat is het goed… de zinnen die deze vrouw schrijft, de spanning die van elk ervan uitgaat… Spanning wordt vaak geassocieerd met plot, met vooralsnog achtergehouden informatie over het verloop van een verhaal. Maar de spanning die in één enkele zin kan zitten, die is minder grijpbaar. Toch heeft het ook op dat niveau te maken met wat niet wordt gezegd, denk ik, met subtekst die broeit onder de daadwerkelijk geschreven tekst. Kafka is daar een meester in, Coetzee ook.

Is het toevallig dat dat een landgenoot is van Gordimer? Ik heb veel aan Coetzee moeten denken tijdens het lezen, vooral aan ‘Disgrace’. Misschien is dat afgezaagd, misschien is het een gemakzuchtige link tussen twee geweldige schrijvers die toevallig in hetzelfde land zijn geboren. Maar ja, dat land wordt natuurlijk wel zichtbaar in het werk van die schrijvers. En misschien zit ook in dat land de broeierige spanning die ik al waarnam in de taal. De spanning van een even rijke als wispelturige natuur, maar vooral ook de spanning die de kansenongelijkheid tussen bevolkingsgroepen met zich meebrengt, zeker in The Conservationist, dat zich afspeelt ruim voordat apartheid werd afgeschaft.

Waarom horen we zelden meer iets over Gordimer? En wel over Coetzee? Is het omdat Gordimer dood is? Neemt ze als witte schrijver ruimte in die nu aan zwarte auteurs moet worden gegund? Wordt haar werk niet meer actueel geacht, omdat ze schrijft over een systeem dat niet meer bestaat? Dat mag dan wel zo zijn, kansenongelijkheid is van alle tijden — net als briljant schrijven. Gordimer, niet voor niets ook Nobelprijs-laureaat, is in één klap toegetreden tot mijn galerij van favoriete naoorlogse schrijvers.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Someone in my book club said of this novel that it makes you feel dumber while you're reading it but smarter once you've finished. I just found that to be really spot-on. No doubt, this is a difficult read, both in style (long, rambling sentences, extended stream-of-consciousness passages, non-English words scattered throughout) and in substance (it's about apartheid, and also, not much actually happens). The best way I found to describe it is that it's like an impressionist painting -- when you're close up, in the thick of reading it, it just seems like a blur of random words, but after you step back a bit (say, when you've finished a chapter), things snap into focus and you realize what you've just read. It's kind of an exhausting endeavor. But I did feel that I learned some things while reading it: about South Africa, race relations, sexual power dynamics, what "veld" and "vlei" and various other Afrikaans words mean. And the book has lovely descriptions of the natural landscape and a chapter which takes place on New Year's Eve that is one of the best bits of writing I've read recently. Overall, an interesting, if challenging, Booker prize winner.

[Vince Will Iam · Rating 2 out of 5]

For too long I kept wading through Gordimer's lengthy allegoric description of a muddy South African farm and its degenerate owner called Mehring. She describes a country that is rotting from within, waiting for impending doom. Mehring embodies the spirit of the Afrikaner who gets bogged down in his own capitalistic views and racial prejudices, thus perpetuating the status quo. All his family leaves him behind and all he has left is a piece of burnt land for which he shows an excessive and faked sentimentality. His black laborers are mere caricatures or ghosts. So many brilliant descriptive passages but too little of a plot to get your teeth into.

[Merilee · Rating 5 out of 5]

More like a 9/10. Gordimer writes brilliantly and I always find her subject matter interesting. This book about South Africa, as usual, might seem a tiny bit dated, as it was written, I believe, between 1972-74, but it captures the agonies of the time from the perspective of a somewhat clueless, but mostly well=meaning, middle-aged white man.

[Alex Rendall · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1974 Booker Prize was the first to be awarded to two novels jointly; Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist is the first of the two that I have read. The novel’s title is interesting, in that Mehring, Gordimer’s white South African farm owner protagonist, would almost certainly not consider himself to be a conservationist, in the environmental sense. At times boorish and misogynistic, Mehring is absolutely opposed to any changes in the status quo of apartheid South African political organisation and attempts to keep everything on his farm running smoothly by keeping firm control over his Black workforce. Mehring can be said to be Gordimer’s personification of what was fundamentally wrong with the South African state at the time that she wrote the novel; a privileged businessman, who owns and runs a farm which he only visits at weekends, yet expects to be able to keep it fully under control.

However this is too simplistic an assessment; Gordimer imbues Mehring with a real love for the land that he owns and she conveys this through the frequent paragraphs where Mehring contemplates the breathtaking beauty of the environment that surrounds him. Mehring knows that his farm is neither particularly profitable nor productive, yet he keeps coming back to it because he is beguiled by its setting. There are frequent allusions as to why Mehring bought the farm; it was intended to be a secret love-nest for him and the married woman who he was having an affair with at the time. The woman is never named, and it is hinted that their relationship was brief, yet Mehring’s thoughts frequently return to the occasion when she came with him to look over the farm before he purchased it. Her refrain “I’d leave it all just as it is” seems to haunt Mehring, and it is arguably this more than anything that makes him the conservationist of the novel’s title.

With the woman long gone, Mehring seems to only gain satisfaction from his relationship with his farm. He finds his other human relationships wanting; his ex-wife in America is a pest, his (implied) gay son is a disappointment to him and he retreats further and further from his circle of fellow businessmen friends and their families as he seeks to avoid their company. Mehring is seemingly haunted by this one conquest, although she is not the only one by any means; Gordimer portrays him as a suburban lothario, who also has an unhealthy interest in teenage girls.

This interest is systematic of what Gordimer intends the novel to represent on a macrocosmic level. Mehring takes what he wants, without thinking through the consequences or of the damage he does, and this can be said to be representative of the South African state at the time. On a couple of occasions Mehring appears to get caught out, but Gordimer’s stream-of-consciousness third person prose, lacking in quotation marks when characters speak, makes some of these episodes difficult to understand. Perhaps Gordimer intended these revelations of discovery to be deliberately ambiguous but I did find them very hard to follow. Although this makes the novel flow in a naturalistic way between prose and dialogue, the ensuing lack of clarity for me is the one flaw in what is otherwise a beautiful novel.

Mehring’s relationship with his Black African members of staff seems to be relatively neutral. Although he doesn’t help them to achieve emancipation, he doesn’t treat them badly either. He recognises that staff like Jacobus work hard for the farm, even if they sometimes take small liberties while he is away. Gordimer makes it clear that she does not support the Blacks’ impoverished and inferior state (one particular passage concerning a Christmas coupon is particularly poignant) but she doesn’t use Mehring as a means of enforcing this system upon them; rather she criticises the political system itself, in the form of shadowy references to the police and what they do to Blacks who don’t possess the appropriate papers.

The Conservationist is a novel about apartheid, that isn’t explicitly political. It makes a powerful statement against apartheid without directly condemning it; every word drips with anger at the injustice of the suffering of the marginalised Black South African characters, who are clearly metaphors for the Black South African community as a whole. But these appear to be almost incidental compared to the size and power of the South African landscape, which is the true star of Gordimer’s novel. This is a majestic paean to the rapidly changing South African countryside; a brilliant work that, while calling for change in its unjust politics, evokes a geographical location that truly deserves to be conserved.

[Μέριλιν · Rating 4 out of 5]

Αυτό το βιβλίο σίγουρα εμπλουτίζει τις περιπέτειες ενός αναγνώστη που εξερευνά τα είδη λογοτεχνίας. Αναμφίβολα είναι μία αναγνωστική περιπέτεια.

Κόλλησα χρονικά με αυτό το βιβλίο γιατί έχει απίστευτες περιγραφές ήχων, σκιών, αρωμάτων, μυρωδιών, αέρηδων, θροϊσμάτων, εντόμων, νερού, ποταμού, σαβάνας, ζώων, φυτών, χώματος, εντομοκτόνων, ρούχων, σπιτιών, βουνών, δένδρων, δρόμων, διαδρόμων κλπ κλπ. Η τεχνική αυτού του μυθιστορήματος είναι μοναδική και ιδιαίτερη. Χρησιμοποιεί ένα συγκεκριμένο μέρος στον χάρτη της γης, μία συγκεκριμένη δεκαετία η οποία απλά υπάρχει σαν ένα ακόμα αντικείμενο περιγραφής, και σαν να κρατά μία κάμερα μας περιγράφει ότι εστιάζει ο φακός, συμπεριλαμβανομένου και των ανθρώπων που πιάνει ο φακός. Μαθαίνεις τα πάντα για τα ρούχα τους, τα χαρακτηριστικά τους, τα ονόματά τους, τις σχέσεις τους, τις ενασχολήσεις τους αλλά σχεδόν τίποτα για όλα τα άλλα που συνήθως ασχολείται ένα κλασσικό μυθιστόρημα.

Δεν ξέρω αν το διάβασα μέχρι το τέλος από καθαρή περιέργεια επειδή η συγγραφέας έχει πάρει νόμπελ και ήθελα να μάθω το γιατί. Η αλήθεια όμως είναι ότι δεν μπορούσα να το αφήσω με τίποτα και μου είχε σπάσει τα νεύρα. Με είχε εκνευρίσει τόσο πολύ που δεν μπόρεσα ούτε άλλο μυθιστόρημα να διαβάσω παράλληλα κάτι που συχνά κάνω. Περίμενα, με αγωνία θα μπορούσα να πω, να δω που το πάει η συγγραφέας με τους ήρωες που μας παρουσίαζε μέσα στο κείμενο και δεν μπορούσα ούτε καν να μαντέψω. Ταυτόχρονα ούτε διαγώνια μπόρεσα να το διαβάσω. Με είχε στην κυριολεξία κρατήσει αιχμάλωτή του.

Διαβάζοντας και το τελευταίο κεφάλαιο κατάλαβα ότι όντως δεν το πήγαινε πουθενά η συγγραφέας. Οι ήρωες ήταν απλά ένα κομμάτι του φακού της και ένα αντικείμενο του ταλέντου της να περιγράφει τα πάντα όλα πάνω τους. Με άλλα λόγια, αυτό το βιβλίο δεν έχει σενάριο. Και μάλιστα σε παραπλανεί από την αρχή ότι δήθεν έχει σενάριο επειδή υποτίθεται ότι βρίσκεται ένας νεκρός μέσα στο κτήμα του Ολλανδού ιδιοκτήτη, ένα πτώμα που δεν το συλλέγει η αστυνομία αλλά το θάβει εκεί με σκοπό να το πάρει αργότερα.

Το ανύπαρκτο σενάριο του σε παραπλανεί πολλές πολλές φορές ακόμα κατά τη διάρκεια της ανάγνωσης. Όλο κάτι γίνεται και λες όπα όπα τώρα θα έρθει η έκπληξη που περιμένω ως αναγνώστης,. τώρα θα δέσουν όλες μαζί οι σκηνές. Μία πρώην σύζυγος, ένα έφηβος γιος, μία γκόμενα που θέλει και δεν θέλει, μία κόρη φίλου που μεγάλωσε και μπορεί κάτι να γίνει, ένα ινδός, ένας γιος ινδού, μία υπηρέτρια, ένας πολύωρος αυνανισμός μία άγνωστης έφηβης στο αεροπλάνο κάτω από μία κουβέρτα, ένας καφές σε μία καφετέρια όπου συχνάζουν φοιτητές, μία πυρκαγιά, μία πλημμύρα, ένα ταξίδι, μία επιστροφή, μία τρελή, και ΑΥΤΟ το τέλος που σου τινάζει τα μυαλά και μόνο τότε καταλαβαίνεις γιατί έχει αυτόν τον τίτλο. Ο τίτλος είναι και το μοναδικό σενάριο του ανύπαρκτου σεναρίου.

[Jason C. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I forced myself to read this for one of my classes. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment. Gordimer's writing style is so verbose and insufferable to read. Sure, she tackles big issues of colonialism and race relations in apartheid South Africa during the 60s? 70s? but I for one found it difficult to care about anything going on in this novel. The story is about some rich, misogynistic white dude who owns a farm in rural South Africa and tries desperately to form an intimate relationship with the land but he can't since he is, uh, white and the land doesn't belong to him in the first place since his colonial predecessors took the land away from the native Africans. He continues to uphold their conservative principles of white privilege and colonial power. Oh, a dead body also shows up on his property. He is pretty upset about this and complains to the authorities but since it is a dead black body, they don't really care. Racism and all that.

The novel is full of ironies. He is a business man and venture capitalist but also, as the title indicates, a "conservationist" (how clever!). He is referred to as a farmer but ironically, does not do any farming at all. Instead, he exploits the labor of his black workers (what else is new). In one of many bizarre scenes, he fingers a girl on a plane (Gordimer embellishes this sexual violation with such lengthy poetic detail that it is cringe-worthy) and in the attempt to become one with nature, he crouches down in his field to unload his bowels. No, I am not kidding--this really happens. I could be wrong but perhaps his act of defecation on the land is symbolic of the white colonialists before him who took a massive shit on Africa. Maybe.

Anyways, I am sure postcolonial critics will find plenty to say about the novel, especially its employment of heavy symbolism while also praising her narrative techniques (I for one found her stream-of-consciousness and free indirect discourse bloody annoying). Furthmore, reading this novel within the ideologically framework of cosmopolitanism could make for some interesting discussion on white colonialism but quite frankly, who cares.

[Rosalind · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this while in hospital recently.

There's something going on, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr Mehring? Mehring farms tax breaks for fun in the High Veld. He doesn't need it to make a profit; it would defeat the object if it did and anyway he's already a rich man from his status as a pig-iron magnate. But his world is falling apart in some vague way. His wife has left him and gone to New York, his son who has funny ideas about overturning the natural order has gone to join her, and his radical lover has gone off somewhere too and can't come back. His black workers are oddly distant and when a dead body appears on the farm the police don't seem in too much of a hurry to do anything about it.

It's all very mysterious, played out as if in a dream, fuzzy and somehow not quite right. The story moves along slowly, as lazy as life on the high veld under a burning sun, fantastically atmospheric and fuzzy as a dream. Just when you think you're going to drop off, there's an episode of startling and perverted eroticism. That weakness for young women, it's going to be the death of Mehring, you just know it.

Not an easy book to love, but I'm glad I read it and one day I'll read it again to pick up all the subtleties I undoubtedly missed. I have a feeling it ought to be magnificent, but it falls a little short.