Scan barcode
A review by tomleetang
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
4.0
"Yet while he listens, smiles exasperatedly into the telephone in his right hand, his other hand plays with himself the way a small boy seeks reassurance by touching his genitals - his fingers comb the damp springy hair, draw down the foreskin that has been pushed back during the shower, weigh the uneven balls, absently tender to the one that is smaller and lighter than the other."
This sentence exemplifies the style of The Conservationist: long, meandering sentences that can be a bit distracting but often deliver unexpected tangents, which stand out because they defy expectation and as a result provoke deeper analysis - what is that doing here? And why has it been placed here?
Within a paragraph, threads of thought interrupt one another, jumping without warning from a farmer's observations on jackals to the shape of a penis head. Lush, dreamy descriptions of the velt and vlei by the white protagonist conceal the rot beneath - the rot being literally and metaphorically the dead body of a nameless black man.
This novel is about Apartheid and the nature of South African society, but it isn't loudly hectoring in its politics, merely penetratingly observant. There is a plot, but it is utterly subservient to the style of the writing and the ideas the novel propounds.
This sentence exemplifies the style of The Conservationist: long, meandering sentences that can be a bit distracting but often deliver unexpected tangents, which stand out because they defy expectation and as a result provoke deeper analysis - what is that doing here? And why has it been placed here?
Within a paragraph, threads of thought interrupt one another, jumping without warning from a farmer's observations on jackals to the shape of a penis head. Lush, dreamy descriptions of the velt and vlei by the white protagonist conceal the rot beneath - the rot being literally and metaphorically the dead body of a nameless black man.
This novel is about Apartheid and the nature of South African society, but it isn't loudly hectoring in its politics, merely penetratingly observant. There is a plot, but it is utterly subservient to the style of the writing and the ideas the novel propounds.