≡ Download Gratis The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer Books

The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer Books

Download As PDF : The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer Books

The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer Books

This is yet another beautifully crafted novel from Nadine Gordimer, framed within the early pre-revolt period of the Apartheid era in her native South Africa. Through Gordimer's craft in use of language, she provides for the reader a visual masterpiece of the land and the people as they live together and separately during that period. The tension wrought by Apartheid and the complex history of South Africa is palpable in the descriptions of the wild lands, the mud, the swamps and the weather in the veld; the durability of the lands, and the fragility of the people. My experience of the main character of Mehring is that he is not totally aware of what is happening either to himself in his total isolation, or of the tumultuous revolt boiling 'under the surface', or 'in the wind'. It felt to me that he knew at some level that it was due to explode around him, thus he was both horrified and intellectually pre-occupied with the notion that he would be 'absorbed into the muck' of the land, so that no one would even know that he had been there. A metaphor for the understandable terror and reactive brutal oppression wielded by the governing white minority: they knew that they were on the brink of absorption into the dark and the mud. The "Rainbow Nation' was a hopeful view to emerge in the post-Apartheid future painfully wrought though the process of Truth and Reconciliation.


Tags : Amazon.com: The Conservationist (9780140047165): Nadine Gordimer: Books,Nadine Gordimer,The Conservationist,Penguin Books,0140047166,Literary,Domestic fiction,Loss (Psychology),Rich people - South Africa,South Africa - Social life and customs,FICTION Family Life General,FICTION General,FICTION Literary,FICTION Small Town & Rural,Fiction,GENERAL,General Adult,Literature - Classics Criticism,Modern fiction,nobel prize winners in literature;booker prize winners;man booker prize winners;booker prize shortlist;man booker prize shortlist;classic literature;literature;american literature;literary fiction;caribbean;literary;historical fiction;historical novels;contemporary fiction;trinidad;family;20th century;haiti;politics;political books;immigration;marriage books;marriage;book club recommendations;book club;immigrants;relationship books;relationships;humor;women;romance;romance books;latin america,africa; apartheid; 20th century; booker prize winners; man booker prize winners; booker prize shortlist; man booker prize shortlist; classic literature; literature; american literature; literary fiction; caribbean; literary; historical fiction; historical novels; contemporary fiction; trinidad; family; contemporary; haiti; politics; political books; immigration; marriage books; marriage; book club recommendations; book club; immigrants; relationship books; relationships; humor; women; romance; romance books; latin america

The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer Books Reviews

Gordimer's prose are difficult but evocative. She brings out the seasons and the land of the South African highveld beautifully. Relationships between the ethnic groups and the frustrations that erupt from the combination of stark inequality and inevitable interdependence are shrewdly delineated. The pace is slow and depictions of everyday events can be overdrawn. Yet when action is portrayed the effect can be devastating, as much by what is not said as by what is - as exemplified by the riveting ending.
I purchased this book because with the death of the author I realized I didn't know anything about her work. This book gave me a view of South African life from the perspective of a businessman and gentleman farmer. His desire to preserve the land is what the title is about but more important is the view of society presented. It was an easy read and worth the time.
A good book that captures the underlying tensions and perceptions of the various races in South Africa at the time (the 1970s) as well as an understanding of the tensions within families and between a father and his son. Written in a free flowing consciousness manner, weaving ideas together, I found it a fascinating book, as relevant today as it was 35 years ago or so when it was written. It is good to re-discover Nadine Gordimer in this year of her death and find how undated her works appear.
I've wanted to read Gordimer for years, but I think this might not have been the best first choice. The book is difficult to follow, for example the "he" pronoun might switch to another "he" in a sentence or two, without any indication that it is another "he" who is now the subject of the sentence. This was not an easy read. The description of apartheid is there, and she crafts some beautiful sentences, but overall I didn't find it a great read. I will read another book of hers based on her lovely writing that I came across in this book. But truth be told, I found myself plowing through this book to finish it.
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.
This is yet another beautifully crafted novel from Nadine Gordimer, framed within the early pre-revolt period of the Apartheid era in her native South Africa. Through Gordimer's craft in use of language, she provides for the reader a visual masterpiece of the land and the people as they live together and separately during that period. The tension wrought by Apartheid and the complex history of South Africa is palpable in the descriptions of the wild lands, the mud, the swamps and the weather in the veld; the durability of the lands, and the fragility of the people. My experience of the main character of Mehring is that he is not totally aware of what is happening either to himself in his total isolation, or of the tumultuous revolt boiling 'under the surface', or 'in the wind'. It felt to me that he knew at some level that it was due to explode around him, thus he was both horrified and intellectually pre-occupied with the notion that he would be 'absorbed into the muck' of the land, so that no one would even know that he had been there. A metaphor for the understandable terror and reactive brutal oppression wielded by the governing white minority they knew that they were on the brink of absorption into the dark and the mud. The "Rainbow Nation' was a hopeful view to emerge in the post-Apartheid future painfully wrought though the process of Truth and Reconciliation.