Gordimer, Nadine

The Conservationist

ISBN: 067023883X
New York, NY: The Viking Press, Inc., 1975. First American Edition. Hardcover. "A wealthy industrialist, attractive to women and not yet fifty, Mehring wants for nothing that white privilege in a black country can bring him. With a luxury flat in the city and an expense-account farm in the country, what he is prepared at all costs to conserve is his way of life. Neither his leftist mistress nor his long-haired schoolboy son- both of whose love he is confident he can do without- can shake his faith in his unalienable right to his possessions. No one successfully disputes his claims- not Jacobus and the other ragged black workers who tend his four hundred acres of the Transvaal, or the Indians who run the country store, or the Boer farmers who regard him as an amateur, or the 150,000 blacks who live in a segregated township between farm and city. Only the presence of a dead man, abandoned near the river, asserts that Africa, in the end, is something a white man can't buy." (from front flap) The sixth novel by Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), the great & prolific South African writer, among her most popular works & the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize. An intense study both of one complicated man & the society of apartheid-era South Africa. Hardcover in clipped dust jacket, first American edition, preceded the previous year (1974) by the first UK edition. See also our item No.s 2369 & 2511 (vintage journals with Gordimer contributions). An essential Gordimer classic collectible in one of its rarest original forms & in exceptionally, relatively superb condition: Book very fine with the slightest touch of wear & fading to thin edges & corners of front, back covers & spine; sparse spotting to side & lower edges of text block; medium spotting, light scratching & fading to yellow-dyed upper edge of same. Interior very fine with only tiny bumps at upper corners of a few page leaves; slight, faint vertical waving to blank front endpaper; otherwise substantially mint. Dust jacket very fine with only mild rubbing to front, esp. back covers & spine; a bit of wear & a few tiny bumps at edges & corners of same esp. spine-edges & corners; one very short, closed tear at lower outer corner of front cover. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #4479]

Price: $75.00