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Title: An unparalled story of an African farm
Review: Gordimer's Booker-prize winning novel is one of the least overtly political of her works--at least in the most traditional understanding of "political fiction" (fiction about the machinations of state power). Yet the book remains a forceful, intricate exploration of power, as timely today as it was in 1974, as relevant to contemporary America as it was to minority-ruled South Africa. I have read--and written about--each of Gordimer's novels, and The Conservationist remains a favorite. Nowhere else in contemporary English-language fiction have I found such memorable passages about landscape; nowhere else have I found such a subtle exploration of self. I recommend the novel to anyone remotely interested in the modernist novel, to anyone who has ever sat under the spell of Virginia Woolf (Gordimer, too, is a Woolf reader), to anyone who turns to literature for both Beauty and that old hound Truth.
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