Reviews

• Dense

  Oddly enough, I could appreciate the magnificent density of this book less from reading it than by thumbing through it afterwards. Only then could I see the intricacies of its recurrent images, its shifts of voice and time, and the rapid interplay of the separate cultures -- white, black, and Indian -- which made up South Africa in the last years of Apartheid. It is not an easy book to follow; drift for even a moment, and you lose track of who is talking about whom. Other readers have compared Gordimer to Faulkner and Virginia Woolf; I personally find her slightly easier than Faulkner, but a lot more difficult than Woolf -- mainly because it is not only Gordimer's style that is strange to me, but her entire world. These are people who live under outrageous legal and social conventions and consider them normal; they inhabit a country where even ordinary things can have strange names (like "mealies" for corn, or "vlei" for shallow lake), and apparently ordinary words (such as "location") can have special meanings. But I am grateful for the insight; from first page to the last, this book breathes authenticity. The Conservationist of the title, a wealthy industrialist named Mehring, buys a weekend farm and works to restore it. This puts him into a new relationship with his black employees, his Boer neighbors, and the land itself. As the ecological task turns out to be largely beyond him, the title comes to have other meanings: the conservation of the way of life of a privileged elite, the preservation of a benevolent patronage between the races, and the search for a basic humanity. Mehring may fail, but he is not a bad man nor, as some have suggested, a cold one. We will meet his like again in DISGRACE by fellow South African Nobelist JM Coetzee -- a much easier novel, though less rich. The protagonists of both books have some unwise (but here very erotic) sexual encounters, and try to find themselves through closer contact with the land. But whereas Coetzee's antihero must learn to cope with a world that has changed more quickly than he can, Gordimer's is trapped in the cul-de-sac of a society where no progress is possible because the true change has not yet happened. Difficult though the book may be, Gordimer holds everything together by three very special qualities in her writing: the ease with which she penetrates the mind and slips into interior dialogue, an underlying sensuality in almost everything she writes, and a deep love of the African landscape. A single example must suffice; in the midst of lovemaking, Mehring thinks of the landscape of nearby Namibia: "The dunes of the desert lie alongside the road between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay. Golden reclining nudes. Torso upon torso, hip sweeping from waist, smooth beyond smoothness, suggesting to the tactile imagining only the comparison, in relation to the hand, of the sensation of the tongue when some substance evanesces on it." Simple images shifting and becoming denser. Complex writing, perhaps, but appropriate to a novel fueled equally by love and despair, that attempts to shine a moral clarity upon a situation that is virtually impenetrable.

• A challenging but powerful read

  NOT an easy read but gives real insight into the relations of the different cultural groupings of apartheid S. Africa, and a sometimes startling view of the main character, a very human mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, giving a strong sense of his own inner turmoil despite his affluence and social acceptance as a successful businessman,

• The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

  good book

• Not Quite Passing the Test of Time

  I did not realize when I purchased “The Conservationist” that it was written 50 years ago. Has it survived the test of time? It is still in print which suggests that it has done so. But other considerations argue to the contrary. The primary character Mehring is a wealthy, white, South African businessman who purchased a farm seemingly to fill the void left by his failed marriage, his strained relationship with his son and shallow relationships with other women. He visits the farm on Sundays while the foreman and workers he hired, all from the local black community, run the farm. Mehring fancies himself to be conservationist of sorts. He finds some solace in being at the farm but not the deeper satisfaction he is seeking. “The Conservationist” rambles along rather cumbersomely as Mehring interacts with his staff at the farm and some other local residents, observes their lives and reflects back on his life. The novel starts out from a third person perspective but slowly slides into a first person perspective – an uneasy mix that is difficult to follow. In summary, “The Conservationist” is a difficult read and appears to have suffered a bit as fiction evolved in other directions over the years.

• Hard Going.

  I tried and tried to like this book but eventually after getting halfway though I had to admit defeat. I figured it had to be good if it won the Nobel Prize for literature and the 1974 Booker prize but I guess that's not always a recipe for popularity or even acceptance. I found it really hard to compartmentalise the stories within stories as it seemed to flit from one location to another and I never felt as if I had a grip on the Author's intention. The writing style is not my cup of tea, no punctuation and sentences cut short, no explanation given. No doubt there will be a lot of academics scoffing behind ther sleeves at my critique but this is how I see it.... simply hard going.

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