2 1/2 stars

Claire Messud tries SO HARD ALL THE TIME.

truly a 3.5 rating but rounded up. the stories are good, but can be convoluted by the long winded comma-ridden sentences (several times I had to reread sentences--more than once!--because I would forget the subject) and unnecessary word choices that distract from the stories.

in the first, maria, a housekeeper, reflects on "the end" as she realizes her longtime employer-slash-friend is nearing death and can no longer care for herself. this prompts a reflection of her life as a frivolous ukrainian girl in labor camps in wwii to her status as displaced person in canada, and the quiet love story that blossoms with lev. their son, effortlessly canadian, falls in love with a woman who maria thinks is "not a nice girl" and the chasm between first and second generation immigrant parent and child widens. all of maria's hurts: the loss of lev, the widening gap in her relationship with her son, being the least favorite grandmother, the way her daughter in law refers to her as a DP, the obsessive way she cleans and preserves her house (thunk plastic coverings on everything she uses, making her home a place her own family can't feel comfortable in when they visit)--all of these hurts are discussed but not over examined and that's where they resonate with me, the way people silently carry on. the story ends when maria can realize that she has been, in other ways, holding herself back from carrying on and buys herself a painting. a simple story, but somehow still captivating.

the hunters is too complicated to type out a review for one my phone... must be done later.

A luminous narration of the lives of two very different women. Themes of alienation, loneliness and love.

(review originally written for bookslut)

Ah, the strange predicament of the novella writer. They're seemingly too short to publish singly, yet how to group them into collections? Thematically? Chronologically? Randomly? Sometimes these groupings work, and sometimes they just don't. Claire Messud's The Hunters is one of those cases where it just doesn't.

The Hunters is comprised of two novellas, "A Simple Tale," and the title story. "A Simple Tale" is the story of Maria Poniatowski, a Ukrainian woman who moved to Canada after WWII, and became a housecleaner. Maria is widowed, partially estranged from her only son and his family, and seeing her pool of clientele shrink as the women she works for, mostly contacts made in the first few years after the war, gradually succumb to old age. It is the story of a woman in exile, who lives her entire adult life in a country that does not share her values nor her native tongue. Maria's character is sympathetic, and her story draws the reader in.

After the simple delight of "A Simple Tale," "The Hunters" was a big disappointment. "A Simple Tale" I read hungrily, but after wading about ten pages in to "The Hunters," I put the book down and could not bring myself to pick it up again for over a month. When I finally came back to it, I found the story to get slightly more engaging, but it still paled in comparison to the first novella.

"The Hunters" was off-putting from the start, as the narrator (whose gender is not revealed) spends pages obsessing over the change in the millennium. Here I suppose the fault could be in myself, the reader, for I could not separate my enjoyment of the book from my utter boredom with the theme of changing millennia. The hype over the new millennium was so overplayed that I was bored with it before the date ever changed, now two (or three, depending on how you count) years later, I find the topic still bores me. I hoped that once we were past this bump, we could settle down and I could find some other means of identifying with the narrator, but this hope was never realized.

It started, I suppose, with the mystery of the narrator's gender (which I did actually not realize until half-way through the novella, early on I had read the feminine into some pronoun or other and had assumed the narrator was a woman from that point forward). It was not half so cleverly done as Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body and worse, there seemed to be no point to it.

The narrator is an academic on sabbatical who has rented a flat in a run-down area of London. During the day s/he goes to the libraries to research attitudes on death through time, and during the day s/he returns to the flat, to sit in the dark and spy on the neighbors across the way, or develop obsessive fantastical theories about his/her downstairs neighbors, a woman and her mother, the woman being the only person who regularly intrudes into the narrator's anonymous existence. The narrator never gets involved in anything. Not in research, it seems, for we never hear of it. Not in the lives of the neighbors, as s/he avoids contact with them as much as possible, and tries to cut short what contact does occur. The narrator merely remains a passive observer throughout the story, so it seems difficult for the reader to get involved as well.

I am sure that "The Hunters" would not have been half as disappointing had it not occurred in the shadow of "A Simple Tale." As it is, however, I am very sorry that the two novellas were not published separately. I am sorry that after enjoying "A Simple Tale," I had to trudge through "The Hunters" before I could write a review. I am sorry that if I recommend The Hunters to anyone, they will have to pick up both stories together. And mostly I am sorry that it was not one of Messud's novels, When the World Was Steady, or The Last Life that I happened upon after "A Simple Tale." If one could judge reliably by Messud's online fans, either would have converted me to permanent adoration of her writing, and I could have easily overlooked the shortcomings of "The Hunters."

Some of the most gorgeous sentences anywhere. Two great novellas.

Two short stories that capture the irony and tragedy of the human experience. The first story, A Simple Tale, focuses on a pair of elderly women, one a survivor of World War II internment, and the other her elderly employer. It's full of loneliness, some of it self-imposed out of pride, and some of it, imposed by the harsh environment of adjusting to a new culture and new generation. The second story, The Hunters, follows an academic in London for the summer researching death, who becomes intrigued and disgusted by her downstairs neighbor who she believes is very different from herself. In the end it turns out they are not so different after all. It has a nice twist at the end as well.

Two excellent novellas about characters living their lives on the periphery of others - the first about an elderly WWII survivor feeling increasingly invisible and the second about a younger person trying not to be seen. Both stories are great studies of the casual cruelty with which we push others away and the ways in which we delude ourselves. Messud is probably as good as they come at writing psychologically complex tales that force you to reconsider how you go about your own life. At only 90 pages a piece, you have no excuse - none! - for not at least giving her a test drive with The Hunters.

Hmmm...not sure about these two short stories. Although they were interesting and entertaining, I never quite got the point. A Simple Tale made me sad because I find family to be so important in my life and the main character never seemed to be emotionally connected to any of her family. It was like he/she lived, he/she died, move on to the next one... The Hunters made me feel sad because again, there was such emotional unconnectedness. People pretending to care but hiding their true feelings of disgust or annoyance behind their smiling facade. I hope this is not a reflection of the this author's life because that would truly be sad.

It was OK. I actually don't like her writing style here. Seemed like she was practicing all the tricks they teach you in creative writing classes.

Two novels with completely different plots, but both involving some strange and mysterious characters. Maria is the housekeeper in the first story (“A Simple Tale”): a Ukranian woman who had terrible experiences during the war in a DP camp - many camps in fact, and had a lot of sadness in her life. The second story, “The Hunters,” tells of an American person whose sex is ambiguous, even though it’s told in the first person. The reader never knows his/her name, only knows about her British neighbor in a place she/he has rented near London for the summer. The neighbor lives with her mother downstairs from the protagonist and becomes a mystery who keeps rabbits and tends to old people, who seem to be dying at rather an alarming rate. The protagonist has a vivid imagination that wants to make up stories about the neighbor that involve her killing her charges, and eventually her mother. What really happens, he/she finds out much later, just creates more mystery.

Messud writes the most beautiful long sentences. The novella Hunters captures an elegant and very sad voice. The action is mostly off-stage or imagined. An intriguing short novel.