The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
Published 1974 · 259 pages · 88,031 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Conservationist to read?
The Conservationist scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Gordimer writes in dense, allusive prose that incorporates Zulu phrases, agricultural terminology, and the language of apartheid's bureaucracy. The vocabulary is demanding, requiring readers to engage with multiple registers.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Sentences are often elaborate and fragmentary, moving through Mehring's consciousness in ways that require active interpretation. Gordimer's prose has the difficulty of late modernism.
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- The novel explores possession, belonging, and the contradictions of white ownership in South Africa. These themes are embodied in Mehring's relationship to his farm and the Black workers on it.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- South African landscapes, the machinery of apartheid, and the presence of the dead body on Mehring's land layer through the narrative. Gordimer creates density through the intersection of political and psychological reality.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Mehring's consciousness provides the perspective, but the Black workers' lives remain opaque to him—and thus partially to the reader. The novel's politics lie in what Mehring cannot see.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The unidentified dead body becomes symbolic of Black dispossession and inevitable return. The land itself becomes symbolic of what cannot be possessed despite legal title.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Gordimer maintains devastating ironic distance from Mehring's assumptions about ownership and belonging. The novel sees through white South African consciousness to its self-deceptions.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- The body is finally buried properly by the Black workers, in a ritual that excludes Mehring. The novel ends with a symbolic reclamation that anticipates historical change.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- The novel moves through Mehring's consciousness in fragmentary, non-linear ways. The structure is demanding, reflecting the discontinuities of his moral evasions.
How The Conservationist is regarded
The Conservationist holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.