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.

guess I did expect some more...on what grounds have no idea..
anyways..
after reading the book before which was omg ham on rye by bukowski then I rushed through this one real fast..I don't know...put it the way we did back in my 5th grade...
it was boring....
now u guys don't jump on me all wild now but really..it was let's put it honest alright..nothing more at least not for me...
loved the language...a narrative pace wasn't really all the excitement.honestly...but it was good enough...quick and tiny...if u get all in a land depth with this book,or either drives u nuts or send u to sleep and u wake up and oooh no...here it is again...trust me...
the end..u survive

it is only what?..266 pages...

cake

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.

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.

"The Conservationist" resembles William Faulkner's masterpice "The Sound and the Fury" in several ways: It's subject matter is a dying culture based on racial stratification, the author uses a stream of consciousness style, the story is told from the perspective of three individuals, and it is a magnificent and defining novel.

The principal character is Mehring, a middle-aged white businessman who has purchased a farm outside Johannesburg as a weekend getaway and hobby. Mehring's marriage has failed, he can't relate to his son who is in college, and relations with his lover are intermittent. He is increasingly driven to seek casual sex with younger women. His only attachment is to the land. But it is a hollow love for something he no more understands than he does the people around him.

The other major characters through whose eyes we see South Africa are Josephus, Mehring's black overseer, and an Indian shopkeeper. In each case we see members of a patient older generation fearing change, willing to accommodate, successful in bending the system to their advantage, and fearful of losing what they have.

The story was written and set in the 1970s when South Africa was still very much under an apartheid social system. Gordimer's novel is a protest against that system, but a subtle and sensitive one. It would be a mistake, though, to categorize the novel as political or to assume it is dated. It is a richly symbolic novel about the futility of legislating values and the emptiness of a life based on lies. Its message is portable to any place and time.

The style of "The Conservationist" is difficult to characterize because it shifts from a traditional third person perspective, into an occasional first person, and then into a stream of consciousness mode. The major events occur in chronological order, but a fair proportion of the narrative is spent in flashback. This may make it sound more difficult to read than it is. In a few instance the shift of perspective or time is confusing, but on the whole it is not an especially challenging book to follow, and is definitely easier than "The Sound and the Fury." I would say it is about on a par with Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" as far as difficulty is concerned.

Finally, we can't overlook what will appeal to many readers - the setting, both physical and cultural, of South Africa. Mehring's farm has the universal appeal of rustic serenity with the added dimension of the exotic. No, there aren't any lions charging from the bush, but Gordimer, in very economical prose, evokes the harsh majesty, the sights sounds and smells, of the African veldt. And every bit as fascinating as the landscape is the cultural pastice of African, Indian, Boer and English cultures, each seeing the land - and each other - through the lens of its unique values and myths.