Overrated 2009-09-11

Reviewer: John Oysterman

Got this from a friend as a gift. I expected a bit more from this author, considering her past success and fame, but I have to admit that is far too overrated as a writer. The characters lack dept and her oversized ego is all over the pages. I would not recommend it to anybody.

Basically I Liked It 2008-12-23

Reviewer: Richard Pittman

The Conservationist was shortlisted for the Booker of Bookers and Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her body of work. I liked the Conservationist though it's not a book that I've thought a lot about since I read it about 6 months ago.

It is focused on Mehring, a rich white man in South Africa. He doesn't appear to be an evil man but certainly demonstrates the famous quote , "The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." He is very accepting of apartheid and the ingrained social structure.

Mehring lives an empty existence, content in his financial comfort but missing something in his life. He has everything and yet nothing.

I really enjoyed reading about South Africa in the 70s as written in that time. It had a very real feel to it. It takes a very neutral approach and is not preachy nor is it overtly political. It simply lets the reader reach the obvious conclusions.

I think this is a good book and an enjoyable read but and I was surprised at it being shortlisted for the Booker of Bookers. I liked it and have no particular issues with it.

Dense 2008-11-07

Reviewer: Roger Brunyate

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.

there it is 2007-01-27

Reviewer: Karlo Barbaric

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

Las palabras no dejan ver la oración 2006-12-06

Reviewer: Sergio A. Rosales

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.