Customer Reviews

The conservationist

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It has been several years since I read this novel, and what sticks in my memory vividly is the portrait Gordimer creates of a self-satisfied, white property-owner in apartheid-era South Africa. We see the world through his eyes, and we see how well it serves him, keeping him wealthy and comfortable. While he may notice that some suffer and are oppressed, he is not moved to do anything that would make a difference for them. Instead, he justifies his indifference with a sense of racial and class superiority.

Gordimer captures the mental framework of someone who feels little or nothing for the misfortunes of others. What is interesting for the reader is that it requires an effort to step out of his mind and see his thoughts and behavior for what they are -- insensitive, self-serving, and at times brutal.

Gordimer finds him at a time in his life when he is middle-aged and living alone, no longer married, his grown son estranged from him, and his mistress not all that endeared to him. While money, property, and influence keep him at a safe distance from the political troubles slowly encroaching on his private world, Gordimer reveals his physical and emotional isolation. His defense is to cut his losses and retreat even farther into his solitary world. It's a fascinating, well-written character study.

Gordimer's Booker-prize winning novel is one of the least overtly political of her works--at least in the most traditional understanding of "political fiction" (fiction about the machinations of state power). Yet the book remains a forceful, intricate exploration of power, as timely today as it was in 1974, as relevant to contemporary America as it was to minority-ruled South Africa. I have read--and written about--each of Gordimer's novels, and The Conservationist remains a favorite. Nowhere else in contemporary English-language fiction have I found such memorable passages about landscape; nowhere else have I found such a subtle exploration of self. I recommend the novel to anyone remotely interested in the modernist novel, to anyone who has ever sat under the spell of Virginia Woolf (Gordimer, too, is a Woolf reader), to anyone who turns to literature for both Beauty and that old hound Truth.

Gordimer, as always, provides the reader with stunning, vivid descriptions; living imagery. She describes life on the South African veld, the contrasts between city and country life, and the relationships among people that inhabit this backdrop. Gordimer is always subtle and endows her characters with a realism that illustrates her mastery of perspective and point of view. She intrinsically understands the different people about whom she writes and expertly conveys her understandings to people like me, who can only imagine a world in which daily, mundane details of life are shocking but accepted in apartheid-era South Africa.

Like much of Gordimer's work, The Conservationist starts out slowly, but draws the reader into its intricacy with its exploration of the human mind and the development of human relationships.

The main character of the book, Mehring, is a wealthy businessman who owns a farm in the veld, mostly just to be able to says he owns the farm. His relationships are probed in the book... including relationships with his teenage son, his mistress (who is somewhat of a liberal supporting equality for the South African blacks.) Gordimer is most adept at exposing some of the hypocrisy inherent in these people's dealings.

Gordimer writes some of the most powerful passages I have ever read, including the following: "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 stomach to ignore-- dead and hidden- whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that."

Taken out of context perhaps this comment does not have the same impact, but it is an invitation to read the book. And all of Gordimer's other works which are equally as important and moving.

I never properly understood this book until I lived in South Africa. The myth of the veld -- dating back to the early 20th Century in South African literature -- and the use of land by white South Africans historically is a very powerful force in the region. This book explodes the myth of the veld and the respect some have had for the earth in a way that is very compelling.

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.

This is the story of Mehring, a wealthy high class businessman and landowner from Transvaal who narrated his life throughout internal monologues, reflections and fragment of conversations with the distant son, lovers, adquaints and the workers of his farm, giving us and idea of how empty and lonely without love or ilusions his life is but at the same time full of wealth and privilegues.
Ms Gordimer - using Mehring character - gave us a portrait of a South Africa divided by the Apartheid where social status is linked with the color of the skin and at the same time gave us an idea of the idiosyncracy of all the characters mentioned in this story, the boers, indians and blacks who interact and live together but separated by the racial laws of South Africa.

Cuando terminas de leer El Conservador, suspiras, descansas, dejas caer el brazo por encima del sillón y sueltas el libro. Cuando has llegado al fin te devuelves páginas arriba (como un salmón por el río, a saltos) para confirmar que lo que tú crees haber comprendido era eso exactamente, eso que te cuenta la señora Gordimer en las últimas líneas de su novela.

Te encuentras con el final llevando el mismo paso que te marcaron desde el comienzo. Porque nuestra autora nunca pierde la compostura. Como en la fotografía que acompaña la solapa, ella no se despeina, no se le mueve un pelo, ni para encontrar un cadáver ni para describir un demonio. Su prosa es contenida y espesa. ¿O debiera decir contenida "pero" espesa?

Si lo que busca es transmitir dolor por medio de la arquitectura de su prosa, ella lo consigue. No puedo dejar de pensar en William Faulkner, probablemente el primero en saltar por encima del relato sumario para encontrar esa forma de contar que consiste en inducir al lector, en llevarlo a empujones, a saltos, ¿qué?, ¿cómo?, ¿cuándo? Bien, ella, como Faulkner, escriben como quien teje -digámoslo así- por el revés. Y como levantar esta construcción no es simple, porque todo el tiempo vemos palabras antes que texto, el relato suele resentirse de dinamismo, de vuelo en altura, de caídas al vacío, todo ello en razón de un intelectualismo que apela a un lector que tiene todo el tiempo por delante, que se ha vuelto invulnerable a los finales amplios como sabanas, y que no se obstina en que la literatura sea entretención, pura y simple entretención.

Creo que de esto últmo adolece gravemente esta novela. No entretiene, no seduce con el suspenso, con la prestidigitación con que el autor persuade al lector de que ningún destino (literario, al menos) puede arrogarse un final predecible. La novela es, también, entretención. Leemos para escapar de la rutina y no, como en este caso, para volver a caer en ella. Considero esta novela como buena literatura para escritores, para estudiantes en busca de temas de tesis. Al lector que busque entretención inteligente (para decirlo como Somerset Maugham) le recomiendo devolver este libro al estante.

Written during, and extensively alluding to, South Africa in the mid 70's during the shifting moods of apartheid,the novel is about Mehring, a wealthy business man at the peak of South African elite society who has added a 400 acre farm to his list of aquisitions.Divorced and estranged from his son, who holds new ideals of equality, Mehring only earns superficial respect from his farmhands, led by Jacobus, who see him as merely a transient presense. During a drought, a dead blackman is found on Mehring's farm whom the authorities are to lazy to investigate or do anything about.When the floods come the dead body resurfaces..
I found this a really absorbing, powerful book that survives its apartheid setting as it paints a much broader picture of mans relationship with the forces of nature he cannot control, and of the dislodging of an ancient culture that has formed to be in harmony with its surrounds by one fixated on money,power and alleged progress.
Written in fragments and overlapping stories, this reminds of Dos Passos, Sartre (in "The Reprieve") and Vargos Llosa in "Coversations in the Cathederal", it won't be to everyones taste. I love this style as it absorbs, demands concentration, and creates a much larger picture than books twice the length.For that, I would recommend 'getting into' this style; maybe reading other works by Gordimer prior to this, as this is well worth savouring.

Slowly engaging, this story weaves the life of an African farm into that of its weekend farmer. Thoughtful and compassionate.

This book impressed me in a strange way. It doesn't have a storyline. It is almost uneventful if you will. The text depicts a general situation in which a rich businessman decides to buy a farm in order to escape city life once a week. There he finds himself constrained to live with people of other ancestries in late 1960s/early 1970s South Africa. Social and cultural tensions are present all the time and they are much more disturbing because Mrs. Gordimer doesn't state them as such, but chooses to weave them into everyday's life in a way that is so matter-of-fact.

The narrative is not linear, so I decided to go with the flow and it worked fine for me.