Book Review , Nadine Gordimer's "Loot"

Loot and Other Stories
Nadine Gordimer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
ISBN 0374190909, $23.00 US (hardcover).

Marcia Deihl
Reviewer

As new readers discover the Nobel-prize-winning expatriate South African writer J. M. Coetzee, another South African writer may catch some of this reflected light. Nadine Gordimer's new book of ten short stories, "Loot," deserves it.

Although she is known as a "political" writer, Gordimer delights in more metaphysical matters here. Reincarnation and myth address human powerlessness (over death) just as stories about injustice address our ultimate limitations (in life). In Part 1 of the last story, "Karma," bad things happen to good families, black and white, when they buy a cunning little Dutch gabled house. This five-part story follows several "returns" of one spirit in different bodies and different lives. In one section the narrator is an unborn twin; in another, a white child is found in a toilet in a black township, brought up by black parents, and moves to the city. When she falls in love with a white man, all the questions of identity, home, race, and law are thrown into conflict. At first, deep in love, she sees no problem as she prepared to meet his nice middle class parents: " . . love is in the present, it's her hand slipping beneath his shirt to his chest, it's reading together descriptions of the places in the world maybe they'll save up to see. She did not say: they know I'm white. As if he heard the thought:--I know . . But that you grew up there, school and home, people who are like--your parents, to you--" Their advocate, a Jewish lawyer (stand in for Gordimer herself?), has a fine appreciation for racial injustice, and she battles to prove that this white woman is indeed white. But in a country where blacks often try to pass for white, a hastily drawn up birth certificate ("Race: Colored"--no white parents known) dooms the couple. A few years later, post- apartheid, there would have been no problem, and the formless narrator wonders how an arbitrary law could shift a couple's world so completely. Everyone loses when the literal color of one's skin calls forth decades of complex cultural histories. And South Africa is more complex than the United States, since it has a majority black culture and eleven separate languages are spoken, besides the colonizer's Afrikaans.

The first story, which some have called a naive fable, is the most challenging. Double reversals, mirror images, and the giant toggle switch of fate all enter into play. A giant wave floods away a town, leaving the ocean floor full of a former regime's riches. The poor forage for treasure, amidst the bodies of their murdered compatriots, but a rich man wants only one thing, a mirror. When he finds it, he looks in, and suddenly a second wave washes him away, along with all the others. Before his demise, he had slept with a print of "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, behind his bed. But he never gazed on it, since it was behind him. Did he not see the overthrow of apartheid coming? And when he looked in the mirror, did he see himself? With remorse or revulsion? Did he see the print, or the real wave? And was that second wave a metaphor for his own inner demons, or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, finally catching up with him? Gordimer leaves these crystal facets of interpretation up to the reader. This first story intrigued me more than conventional stories like the aging parent/younger woman plot in "Generation Gap," the interracial love affair in "Mission," or the loss of sexual innocence in "The Diamond Mine." It offered a different sort of "return"a constant revisiting of its possible meaning.

Gordimer has often claimed that she will never write autobiography. But the themes of her inner world are clear in her work: the senseless damnation of whole races of people by outdated law and custom, the triumph of sensuality and love across racial barriers, and the painfully slow changes in power in post-apartheid South Africa.

James A. Cox
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