I liked the second story much better than the first. I liked the voice and the vaguely ungendered narrator/protagonist, found it refreshing. I have two copies of this book.

If you love Henry James -- and mentally diagramming sentences -- as much as I do, you'll be enraptured by these two novellas by Claire Messud. When was the last time I saw 'perforce' in print? Probably when I read The Ambassadors a few years ago. Messud not only assumes an intelligent reader, she awakens your own inner intelligent reader; if you're like me, she/he/they may have gotten a little lazy in recent years. The meticulous precision of her prose commands attention, a shot of adrenaline to the brain. You'll find yourself sitting up a little straighter as you read, and, when you're finished, feeling the loneliness and pain of others -- and maybe yourself? -- a lot more.

I read A Simple Tale, the first novel in the book. It's like a fairly routine sad story. Maria, our main character, lived as a persecuted Pole during her teenage years in World War II, and then emigrated with her husband to Canada. Maria coped with her sufferings and deprivations. She had some happy times, but most of the story is a "simple" tale of her survival.

I didn't grow bored with this story, but, as the title suggests, there's not too much to the tale.

I'm a newly converted Messud fan. I loved these novellas. Although the stories couldn't be more different, they share a very similar emotional atmosphere: isolation and how we reconcile the part of us that "shows" to those parts of us that are hidden, and can we ever reconcile the two? In telling Maria's story, Messud writes that Maria saw parts of herself reflected in the different people that were in her life (son, employers, acquaintances) and she wasn't sure how all of those reflections could possibly reconciled into a whole. (Read the novella, Messud says it much more eloquently). Maria couldn't possibly reconcile herself. Her experiences in the camps schooled her in survival, but at a cost. In the next novella, the protagonist could not be more different than Maria. S/he is unspecified, we don't know his/her name, sex, can't even decode using the sex of the person's partner. S/he is suffering through a break-up, wants as little contact as possible with anyone, is angsty for no reason other than that's what educated, fairly well-off people do in crisis, struggle with the question of "who am i? is it worth it?" S/he struggles with a reconciliation of self, one much less weighty than Maria's, but a reconciliation all the same.

These two short novels have very different subjects (an elderly woman who escaped to Canada from the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine, and a genderless first-person narrator spending a creepy summer in London) but they're both filled with gorgeous, long, sweeping sentences and sometimes-weird-but-totally-believable emotions and experiences.

I need to read this again. Loved it.

A bit too interior/stream of consciousness for my taste, but well written and atmospheric.

"The Hunters," one of two novellas in this edition, is now officially one of my favorite short stories of all time. Absolutely chilling. It gets five stars on its own.

Actually two novellas which I was surprised about!

The first one, A Simple Tale, was okay, it followed a story of a woman's immigration tale through World War Two and her use as a political prisoner through her formative years. While it started out exciting (an incident with the woman she is caring for) it was extremely anticlimactic and disappointing.

The second, The Hunters, is again, anticlimactic, without any answers!!! I was so frustrated through out as it's written really intellectually and it made it hard to follow and then there was just no pay off.

Fabulous book.

Love Messud, but still digesting this one. I'll think more about it while I clean my place; never been so motivated to clean the crib -- or to use em dashes -- thank you, Maria -- and Messud.

I found the two novellas in this volume very thought provoking and depressing. Both were concisely written.