Collection: Loot

Overview
Loot, published in 2003, gathers a sequence of late-career short fictions that probe lives altered by desire, memory and mortality against the unsettled backdrop of post-apartheid South Africa. The book moves between intimate domestic moments and larger social pressures, presenting characters who are often older, reflective, and newly confronted with questions that used to be dealt with by ideology or habit. Situations that might seem small, an argument at a funeral, the rediscovery of an old lover, a quarrel over an inheritance, are treated as openings onto longer histories and unspoken obligations.
Narrative energy is quiet but relentless: incidents trigger ethical reckonings rather than neat resolutions. The tone frequently shifts between wry observation and elegiac feeling, registering both the persistence of personal longing and the changing shape of public life. Gordimer's attention remains moral and particular, attending to the ways individuals attempt to account for themselves when laws, power structures and certainties have been rearranged.

Major Themes
A recurring focus is the idea of "loot" as both material plunder and the intangible gains and losses that accompany social change. Characters measure value not just in money and objects but in memory, dignity and the right to narrate a past. Desire appears as a force that complicates ethical choices; romantic and sexual longings often collide with questions of loyalty, age and responsibility. Memory functions as testimony and as burden, with the past insisting upon attention even as new hierarchies emerge.
Mortality sharpens the stakes. Encounters with illness, death and aging push characters to re-evaluate attachments and betrayals, exposing compromises that were once tolerated or unacknowledged. The shifting social landscape, race, class and the redistribution of power, serves as both setting and antagonist, forcing old assumptions to be renegotiated in private rooms, courtrooms and corridors of power. The moral dilemmas are rarely binary; Gordimer dwells on ambiguity, showing that ethical clarity often dissolves into practical and emotional complexity.

Style and Technique
Prose is precise, compressed and observant, favoring psychological acuity over dramatic plotting. Sentences accumulate detail that reveals character through gesture, memory and small verbal slips. Dialogue is often terse, carrying subtext more than exposition, and perspective moves subtly between close third-person focalization and a more detached narrator who comments on social texture.
Irony and moral scrutiny coexist: humor lightens scenes without displacing the gravity of consequences, while description frequently registers irony by juxtaposing aspiration with reality. Symbolic elements, objects, domestic spaces, episodes of theft or reclamation, are handled economically but carry weight beyond their immediate function. The result is fiction that reads like reportage of conscience: exact about circumstance, alert to motive, and humane in its refusal to reduce complexity.

Character and Setting
The cast leans toward characters who have lived through apartheid and now must navigate its aftermath. They include former activists, comfortable professionals suddenly tested by economic change, caretakers, and those who profit or suffer from new openings. Interpersonal relationships, between spouses, parents and children, lovers and strangers, serve as laboratories where social tensions are felt most acutely. Urban and domestic interiors are described with forensic care, making settings feel lived-in while highlighting the uneven distribution of security and vulnerability.
Encounters across race and class are depicted without facile moralizing; Gordimer is especially interested in how ordinary decencies and cruelties persist regardless of formal political change. The stories often end on a note of unsettled recognition rather than tidy resolution, asking readers to hold the tension between compassion and critique.

Significance
Loot stands as a late testament to Gordimer's sustained ethical imagination, showing how a novelist can continue to interrogate history and private conscience simultaneously. The collection deepens themes familiar from earlier work, responsibility, history and the costs of survival, while responding to contemporary transformations with sobriety and wit. For readers interested in the moral intricacies of a society in transition, these stories offer concentrated, humane portrayals of lives trying to find an honest footing after long dislocation.