The Conservationist

The Conservationist (1974) by Nadine Gordimer The book tells the story of a conservative, white, South African “developmentalist” business-tycoon named Mehring who decides to buy a large ranch/farm outside of Johannesburg. At the beginning of the novel Mehring justifies his purchase as a matter of keeping up a certain level of conspicuous consumption and creating a remote place to seduce married women. While he continuously tries to imagine and live the farm as a kind of edenic nature retreat, his fantasies continuously run afoul of the realities of an apartheid-era farm. He is unable to see past his arrogant delusions of romantic nature without people, even though his farm is created and maintained through the labor of a large number of (black African) people who live and work on the land for a pittance. Mehring appears only on weekends and holidays, but this does not stop him from ordering his farm manager, Jacobus, to do all sorts of bizarre, misinformed, or detrimental work on the farm (which Jacobus quietly resists). The bounds of Mehring’s narrow, small imagination are pushed at through his illusions of his liberal ex-lover, who taunts his judgements and opinions at every turn, yet fails to pierce his studied obstructionism and willfully blind privilege

Quotes

 * A farm is not beautiful unless it is productive. Reasonable productivity prevailed; he had to keep half an eye (all he could spare) on everything, all the time, to achieve even that much, and of course he had made it his business to pick up a working knowledge of husbandry, animal and crop, so that he couldn't easily be hoodwinked by his people there and could plan farming operations with some authority.
 * Gordimer.
 * He rolls onto his side, where he has the impression the reeds facing him hide him as drawn curtains keep out day. The sense of familiarity, of some kind of unwelcome knowledge or knowing, is slow to ebb. As it does, it leaves space in his mind; or uncovers, like the retreat of a high tide, carrying away silt.
 * Gordimer
 * You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense -- there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.
 * Antonia
 * To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore -- dead and hidden -- whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognise that.
 * Mehring