The Conservationist: Booker Prize Winner (A Novel)

By Nadine Gordimer

Book Overview

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 Books

The Booker Prize winning political novel by the Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer

Mehring 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140047166
• ISBN13: 9780140047165
• Release Date: February 1983
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Masterly Work

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.

masterpiece

I have never been in SA, but every one can watch the news these days. This book depicts this country from both sides, the blacks and the whites, in a very realistic way. It seems like both people don't really make it work, because of mistakes they both make out of their own culture. It is one of those books that you will not forget, and for a good reason it is one of her most famous ones.higly recommended.

An unparalled story of an African farm

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.