The Conservationist: Booker Prize Winner by Nadine GordimerMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I wanted to like this, and in theory, I did. I've heard that this is Gordimer's most poetic book and the language is undoubtedly that. I prefer it in straightforward poetry, however, rather than omniscient third person narration. Stylistic considerations aside (which I think are truly about personal preference), the book is artful in its illumination of white male privilege in the form of Mehring, a wealthy industrialist who buys a farm in South Africa (as a "getaway") that he is ill-equipped to run (leaving most of the management to his Black workers headed by Jacobus). Divorced and with an estranged son, Mehring wanders through life with little regard for relationships (platonic and romantic), and whose self-absorption fuels the evils of apartheid. The book opens with a murdered unidentified Black man being found on the farm, and Gordimer artfully allows that body to "surface" throughout the novel in various ways.
The book is very literary, with little distinction between dialogue and narrative, and some beautiful descriptive language. If you are somehow new to apartheid and colonialism in fiction, well this wouldn't be my first recommendation to introduce those topics, but otherwise it is an experience to read this Booker prize-winning book.
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Challenges on Storygraph (@rebcamuse):
2026 Reading Goals 24/60
#192030 Challenge:1974
