The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Suspense fiction. Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm. As the upheaval in Mehring's world increasingly resembles that in the country as a whole, it becomes clear that only a seismic shift in ideas and concrete action can avert annihilation.

Difficult read. The narrative is complex and nonlinear, with bits and pieces coming back or taken from other conversations or lines of thought. Like a washing machine the story tumbles back and forth to finally arrive at the end of the story, after which you need to take the washing out to dry.

That's what I am doing now, still mauling over the story to let it sink in.

Beautiful but complex. This complexity at times also hampered feeling connected to the story.

Dry...but drought-like rather than acidic, the dryness of cracked Karoo earth rather than tart Cape chenin blanc. When reading this book, the mind is forced into an unfocused, baking landscape of shimmering images and strong, unidentifiable smells. At times there are shapes that bear resemblance to something familiar: a plot thread suddenly rearing up from the parched, sandy pages (suitably yellowed with age, untouched). Unfortunately Nadine Gordimer's driven and frankly inventive, yet schematically mindless prose doesn't justify the infrequency of these captivating bulges. Roughly half the scenes require some sort of straw-grasping analysis in order to generate coherence, far more than I'm prepared to indulge in.

The payout in the end was a benzo haziness borne of the African sun, a feeling I actually quite liked, whilst the protagonist's ennui was served generously alongside sketches of a lost place I still call home.