Loot

LOOT and other Stories

by Nadine Gordimer | 237 Pages | Genre: Short Stories| Publisher: bloomsbury | Year: 2004 | Rating: 9/10

Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer explores tragedy and opportunity through the lives of a town’s survivors of an earthquake through the story ‘Loot’, which has the most lyrical narrative among the rest. Loot explores the greed and avarice of people when the ocean bed is bare with treasures, and people are ready to go to extremes to possess others memories. In the end the story takes on a political undertone setting the mood for the entire collection of stories.

My most favorite story in the collection is ‘The Generation Gap’, a sexual allegory of romance and responsibilities, youth and age. It has four grown-up children srambling the lives after their father end the relationship of 42 years and leaves their mother for another woman their age. What follows is an upheaval of the dynamics of their old life; familiar roles and definitions are changed, relationship lines are redrawn. I liked its almost-detached reportage quality of narration, an outsider’s view of a very personal matter, and  that the story never declines into melodrama despite its very nature.

The other stories that I truly enjoyed are ‘Karma’ and ‘Look-Alikes’. This uncomfortably beautiful and wittingly startling book is ‘My Read of the Week’.