I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story
"Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in
The New Yorker, and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it. I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post. Now I will fix that mistake.
From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination. "Once upon
our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings". Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it.
The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours. Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake does ex…