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A review by futurelegend
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
4.0
I finished this while in hospital recently.
There's something going on, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr Mehring? Mehring farms tax breaks for fun in the High Veld. He doesn't need it to make a profit; it would defeat the object if it did and anyway he's already a rich man from his status as a pig-iron magnate. But his world is falling apart in some vague way. His wife has left him and gone to New York, his son who has funny ideas about overturning the natural order has gone to join her, and his radical lover has gone off somewhere too and can't come back. His black workers are oddly distant and when a dead body appears on the farm the police don't seem in too much of a hurry to do anything about it.
It's all very mysterious, played out as if in a dream, fuzzy and somehow not quite right. The story moves along slowly, as lazy as life on the high veld under a burning sun, fantastically atmospheric and fuzzy as a dream. Just when you think you're going to drop off, there's an episode of startling and perverted eroticism. That weakness for young women, it's going to be the death of Mehring, you just know it.
Not an easy book to love, but I'm glad I read it and one day I'll read it again to pick up all the subtleties I undoubtedly missed. I have a feeling it ought to be magnificent, but it falls a little short.
There's something going on, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr Mehring? Mehring farms tax breaks for fun in the High Veld. He doesn't need it to make a profit; it would defeat the object if it did and anyway he's already a rich man from his status as a pig-iron magnate. But his world is falling apart in some vague way. His wife has left him and gone to New York, his son who has funny ideas about overturning the natural order has gone to join her, and his radical lover has gone off somewhere too and can't come back. His black workers are oddly distant and when a dead body appears on the farm the police don't seem in too much of a hurry to do anything about it.
It's all very mysterious, played out as if in a dream, fuzzy and somehow not quite right. The story moves along slowly, as lazy as life on the high veld under a burning sun, fantastically atmospheric and fuzzy as a dream. Just when you think you're going to drop off, there's an episode of startling and perverted eroticism. That weakness for young women, it's going to be the death of Mehring, you just know it.
Not an easy book to love, but I'm glad I read it and one day I'll read it again to pick up all the subtleties I undoubtedly missed. I have a feeling it ought to be magnificent, but it falls a little short.