Loot

March 10, 2003
As was the case with many South African writers, Gordimer's fiction benefited, ironically enough, from the stark moral contrasts created by apartheid. The nine stories in this collection show Gordimer trying to gain a fictional perspective on the new era, and there are some missteps among them as she employs heavy-handed symbolism and less-than-revelatory social observations ("They had met at a party, the customary first stage in the white middle-class ritual of mating choices"). The title story describes an earthquake that "tipped a continental shelf" and drew back the ocean over a vast expanse, so that the detritus of the past, littered over the ocean floor, has been revealed. In response, people rush down into the former ocean bed and try to pry up treasure, unaware that the ocean, in a great wave, is coming back. In another allegorical story, "Look-Alikes," homeless, unemployed laborers invade a college campus, staking out a campsite in the sports fields, and are joined, sneakily at first, then openly, by the college's sympathetic faculty. "Karma" is a series of emblematic sketches set in various periods between WWII and the present day, which include the stories of Norma, an antiapartheid activist who got caught in a corruption scandal, and Denise, a white baby adopted by a black family in apartheid days, absurdly forbidden by law from marrying her white lover. These vividly imagined characters are among the best in the book, but the story is burdened with an awkward reincarnation conceit that is meant to hold the disparate episodes together. Overall, the stories feel tentative, as though they were straight out of Gordimer's sketch book, and needed a layer of finish.

Starred review from March 1, 2003
Nobel prize winner Gordimer will turn 80 this year, and this new collection appears over 50 years after her first collection, Face to Face, was published in South Africa. Revolving around concepts of guilt and innocence, responsibility, justice, and retribution, the ten stories in Loot can be read metaphorically for a country and a citizenry with much to answer for. The stories range from a multipart account of a soul's travel through several lifetimes to a brief vignette about a giant tidal wave that in its retreat reveals treasure and broken bodies on the ocean floor and returns to bury all the treasure hunters. In between are tales of first love and late-in-life romance. This compelling collection presents a bleak view of human existence in general and of Africa's colonial past in particular. Written with a sharp sense of irony, it should be a part of every fiction collection.-Rebecca Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2003
Since Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, her great novels, such as " The House Gun" (1998) and" The Pickup" (2001), have continued to open up the contemporary scene--in her native South Africa and elsewhere--with passionate insight and astonishing storytelling. But many of the short stories in this collection, her first in 12 years, are more situations than fully developed fiction. "Generation Gap" is a hilarious scenario of middle-aged kids in a flap when their elderly father leaves their mother for a young woman. In "Diamond Mine," a teen has her first sexual experience with a soldier in the backseat of the car while her parents in front drone on about the scenery. The longest story, "Mission Statement," about a dedicated woman sent to Africa by an international aid agency, is worth the book, both a brilliant lampoon of the bureaucratic empowerment babble ("projects of policy, infrastructure, communications, trade, treaties . . .") and a haunting drama of modern lovers who can't get free of a past "where violence lies shallowly buried." That's what Gordimer always does best: the sense of history in the bedroom now.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)