Candidly, I don't want to give this book four stars, but the writing has stuck with me. It's certainly better than a three-star read. The pair of novellas was a selection for our book club and it drove a rich dialogue. My final take is that the young author set for herself a few “modernity” tests and she has to have been pleased with the result.

In the title novella, she proves she can nail the unreliable (stream of consciousness) narrator. Part of my “downgrade” is due to my own heightened awareness of the motif, but she does the device great justice.

Also, the title (and our own reading) invokes irony, another measure of the modern criteria she may have set for herself.

None of the characters is particularly likable, either. Another modern trope perhaps.
And .... another horrifying journey through the human cruelties of WWII camps.

At least the novellas are short. So I ask you to forgive the cataloguing of my reservations and give this a read - especially if you like watching an author hone her talents and skills. Ms. Messud is clearly an accomplished novelist.

It's a little scary that Messud writes so perceptively about people in unenviable situations; the first novella in this volume is quite strong if depressing. The second resembles a Hitchcock movie, a bit, but its excessive mannerisms prevent it from opening up into paranoia in a way that would have made it more memorable. It's good to see that in The Emperor's Children she allowed some humor to enter her writing (perhaps too much by some standards) - her first three books are all pretty humorless, with varying degrees of success...

This was a book of two novellas. The first novella was A Simple Tale, about a Ukrainian widow that immigrated to Canada after WWII. The second novella was The Hunters was about an American woman spending a summer in Kilburn, England. The first novella was interesting because it went through the main character's (Maria) life; her difficulties with her clients as a cleaning lady and unhappiness with her daughter in law. The second second novella was slower in the beginning but I ended up enjoying the main character's (unnamed this time) observations about her neighbor. That character had gone to England to write a book and probably assumed that her neighbors would be standoffish because that is a stereotype of the British people. Her neighbor, Ridley, ended up being friendly but the main character found her intrusive.

Both novellas were well written. I liked both stories because the characters seemed like ordinary people that you might run into in daily life and wonder what their lives were like.

I love Claire Messud, and this book features two shorter novellas in one volume. The first story is the better of the two, following a Ukrainian woman through her life in a tiny village to the ravages of concentration camps in WWII, to her emigration to the US, and her life as a cleaning woman. As always, her writing is a gorgeous cluster of ripe words, falling into the pattern of her characters. The words and style of her writing shape the character as much as any events that befall her.

The second story, set in Kilbourne outside bustling London was harder to fall into, but is no less of an impressive piece of writing. Part of my experience was ruined by leaving the book at home when I went on a week-long trip; Messud's books are best devoured in a single sitting, or read in quick sessions close together. Leaving the story for a week ruined the flow of the writing.

Like all of her books, I'll read this one again and again.

1st edition

These two novellas are surprisingly good. The first 'A Simple Tale,' on the surface is a Canadian immigrant story, how people came to Canada after the second World War to make a home for themselves and their next generation. However, it speaks to deeper truths about personhood, home, hope, love and alas, relational conflicts and disappointments. Maria Poniatowski came from the Ukraine. Having lost her own family and close friends, arrived alone to find a new life in Canada. Met Lev in the "Displaced Persons" camp, fell in love, and started a family. Sounds common enough? But not in Messud's exquisite prose. Read my full review on Ripple Effects... especially the excerpts.

The second novella The Hunters is such a unique creation in several aspects... prose, suspense, characterization, and psychological exploration. Makes me think of many contemporary, popular fiction featuring an unreliable narrator. Considering the first publication date of 'The Hunters' being in 2001, all those popular fiction that came after need to use Messud's The Hunter as an exemplar of psychological, suspense writing with insights. She not only casts suspense, but taps deep into the psyche of the narrator in her perception of others, and ultimately, the realization of truth, then comes guilt.

While I discover these two novellas quite late, after so many years after their publication, I'm grateful that at least I've got the chance to savour them now, their relevance has remained timely. Something I'll reread again.

Great characters--internal lives examined in 2 short stories.

I gave this book four stars for the first novella; a beautifully written account of a cleaning woman with a difficult past. I could not get into the second story. It was impressive that the author wrote it in such a different style than the first story but other than that it did nothing for me.

"...the domed brick church--burned, under Stalin, so that only a monstrous metal cage remained of its gilded onion..." (10).
" 'Don't be ridiculous, Maria,' replied Mrs. Ellington above the din of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, in time to which she persisted in tapping her foot despite the gravity of the discussion" (58).
"It was a question of choosing between grimnesses..." (80).
"Nothing had altered since Radek had left home, so many years before, except the creeping amoeba of family photographs along the wall" (87).
"In seeking to preserve her life, in all its precious meaning, she had prevented life from entering" (87).
“I felt at once, and palindromically, like a dog and a god, and these were not contradictory experiences” (102).
“…even teenagers, with their flouncing mannerisms and cardboard confidence…” (105).
“She came in as far as the kitchen, where my delicious and private supper lay as bare and intimate to her roving eye as any nakedness. I did not want her in my kitchen. I did not want her to see my supper, suddenly sorrowful rather than jaunty, partially eaten on its plate, nor my wineglass, the sweat of which was broken by my fingerprints and mine alone” (105-106).
“The flat was furnished with a set of oven mitts adorned with the heads of famous composers: they were a routine source of amusement for me, but I did not, at that moment, point them out to my guest” (123).
“I had been careful not to think of my lost love and my failed life, had been willfully repressing the cloud of my terrible aloneness; and so had been left in the same state as a boat becalmed in fog: unseeing, unmoving, unmoored” (140).
“…but it seemed that too much of my battered psyche had fallen prey to her machinations—because machinations I was certain they were…” (141).
“(…but I am also aware of the argument that my late lack of interest in myself is actually a simply good thing)” (148).
“She blushed. The skin beneath her makeup took on its fiery glow, a hue incompatible with the artificial surface” (159).
“…it certainly had the undesired and complicated effect of rendering her fully human” (160).
“(Surely, I groused inwardly, surely promptness and efficiency were what one paid extra for? But perhaps it was merely for the lacquer-black vehicle and its ticking meter?)” (164-165).
“…I could tell the story was no more than that to her either; and was it—for I, too, was agog—any different for me?” (172).
“…the common greed of her search, her desire to own the story in all its melodrama, as if some reflected glory or infamy might fall upon her: God-like, doglike. So unlike me, yet the same” (175).

The first story was good. The second one, not as much.

Beautiful writing. It is two novellas in Ms. Messud’s style (?) of the main character sort of living in her head. I didn’t quite like it as much as The Woman Upstairs with its complicated, interesting characters and storyline. Still, I find myself reflecting on both stories and I appreciate the deftness.

Dull and incredibly over-written. The writing is lovely though.