Novel
The Conservationist
Nadine Gordimer · 1974
Synopsis
Mehring, a wealthy Johannesburg businessman, has bought a four-hundred-acre farm outside the city, mainly to reduce his taxes, and knows nothing about farming: it is his black workers who keep it running, under the foreman Jacobus. One day the latter discovers on the property the body of an unknown black man, whom the police bury on the spot without investigating further. Mehring travels, clashes with his son Terry, who challenges his values, and thinks of his mistress Antonia, an activist forced to leave the country.
Context
The novel appeared in 1974 from Jonathan Cape in London and Viking in New York. The Encyclopædia Universalis sees in it a turning point in the work: to the question that runs through it, namely who is entitled to speak of whom, the book answers by listening to the voice of the Black majority, that of the Zulus above all, whose agrarian rites may keep the land and renew the people who were dispossessed of it. Sam Jordison praised its double-edged writing, which can be read on several levels.
Who it is for
A novel in English, dense in style and with several levels of reading, which for the most part follows the viewpoint of its owner.
Prizes and reception
Booker Prize 1974, shared with Holiday by Stanley Middleton; Stephen Clingman regards it as its author's masterpiece.
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