Booker Prize Winner
The Conservationist
by Nadine Gordimer
Summary
A prosperous Johannesburg industrialist buys a farm outside the city, hoping that ownership of the land will give him the rootedness his life otherwise lacks. Gordimer interweaves his interior monologue with images of the Black workers and tenants whose presence he barely acknowledges, building a quiet, accumulating indictment of white South African self-deception. Her elliptical, image-driven prose makes the political implications all the more inescapable.
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Historical Context & Significance
Gordimer was an anti-apartheid activist who eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.