SOURCE: Review of Loot, and Other Stories, by Nadine Gordimer. Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 1 (1 January 2003): 11.

In the following review, the anonymous critic argues that Gordimer “can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now writing.”

The collision of personal and political agendas and ideals [in Loot, and Other Stories] is analyzed with radiant precision and wit in the 1991 Nobel laureate's ninth collection: eight adamantine stories and two ambitious novellas.

Several of the former are commandingly terse, including the parabolic title story, in which an earthquake reveals both a cluttered ocean floor and the consequences in store for “scavengers” who scurry to its depths; a wry tale of inchoate sexual surrender (“The Diamond Mine”); the monologue of an assassin visiting the grave of his widely beloved victim (“Homage”); and a mordant peek at the transitory nature of earthly pleasures seen in the context of...