Two short stories. Major twist of an ending to the second one titled "The Hunters." As usual for this author, I could not put it down and read it in two nights!

Impossible to provide one rating for these two novellas, as they are so different.

A Simple Tale - unrated
I honestly think I must've missed a huge chunk of this first novella. It ended so abruptly I could make no sense of what the trajectory of the story was. I listened to the last ten minutes at least four times.

The central section, detailing Maria's experiences as a Ukranian worker in a German labour camp during WWII, her escape, marriage, and emigration to Canada, was riveting.

But I have no idea where or how Maria's estrangement from her son or the death of her husband came to pass. And the bookending piece of Mrs. Ellington, Maria's employer, seemed lop-sided. Then, poof, the novella was over. Was there a piece missing from the audiobook? Did I fall asleep and miss a crucial bit? Disappointing, bizarre and I don't care enough to re-listen to figure it out.

The Hunters - 4/5
This was my favourite of the two. I love an unreliable, unlikeable narrator on a journey to self-insight. There was a deeply-explored theme here related to our perception of reality being shaped through the lens of our own self-perception (Anaïs Nin's “We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are”), and/or reality being created or manifested solely by our thinking it into being (in the Cartesian sense, if you want to be high-falutin', but also in the looser, woo-woo sense, law-of-attraction stuff).

But WTF with the bunnies? An almost surreal detail, but at least this one stuck the landing. I wish Messud had developed this into a proper novel; I would've liked the greater scope that a longer format could have provided - especially, more on the nameless narrator's life before London and the romantic break-up that preceded their time there; and life after (the personal transformation referred to due to the new love interest in their life -- queer? either the first or the second would have been a same-sex relationship; we are not told the narrator's gender).

Layered, intriguing, and suspenseful.

Consumed by audio; both read very well by their respective performers.

Stunning. Two distinct stories about people we don’t know before, but do now. I loved the first story about a woman whose life was upended as a teen at the hands of the Germans in WWII. She suffered hard labor, freezing temperatures, starvation, deprivation, and the loss of her family. She survived. She met and married another survivor and they had a child who didn’t know what had come before him. I don’t know why, but it seems that they didn’t fill him in with the details. This is not new. The son knew they were DPs, Displaced Persons, who became Canadian citizens, but he grew away from them and took up with the daughter of a German woman, which destroyed his mom. She was critical, but we don’t know if she ever explained why the girl repulsed her. Oh, it’s a sad tale. Maria is the protagonist and her only confidants are her clients, for whom she cleans. It makes me sad, thinking about it, but without spoiling anything with details, let me say that it is never too late to see life from a different point of view, and that it is liberating.
The second story is odd.

Fairly good. Not one of my new favorites but a nice simple pair of stories that were a good audiobook companion to my work and walking.

Beautifully written. I can't wait to read more of her work!

Wow. Haven't read such a dull, uninteresting character for a while. I'm not sure, though, what makes the character so incredibly boring: her disposition or Messud's tiring style. (The Hunters)

Both stories are interesting and depressing and relatable.

In the early aughts, when this book was out in paperback, someone thought this was a good book for ninth graders and our whole class read it. I think I enjoyed the novellas far more than Messud enjoyed visiting our classroom to talk about them but should probably give them a reread to be more sure. Five stars for the memory.

Feb 03, 2009
This 2001 book contains 2 Novellas, "A Simple Tale" and "The Hunters." It was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award and is Messud's third book after When the World Was Steady and The Last Life.

The NYTimesreview called it "a work of near-miraculous perfection," but a week after reading it, I recall very little of it. "A Simple Tale" traces the life of a Ukrainian woman from her capture by the German army as a teenager, her survival of Krupp's labor camps, marriage and emigration to Canada, and then her disappointment in her only son's "bad marriage." Through most of her adult life she comes in as domestic maid for families that eventually die out until she only has one left, a Tuesday at the home of Mrs. Ellington where she has worked for 46 years when the story actively begins.

The closing event of the narration, a purchase of a brightly colored painting, and the catharsis it seems to represent failed to follow or "signify" to me. What is simple about "A Simple Tale"? Perhaps the author means to refer to the socially insignificant status of Maria--peasant, labor-camp slave, wife and mother, cleaning woman. Her writing is not simple in syntax, certainly; see below for a sample in the story. It is not simple in lacking dramatic incidents, although they mostly left me curious, not involved emotionally.

Of "The Hunters," I recall little but irritation. The language is more intricate than the first story but without charm. Again, my curiosity was awakened but not my empathy. Despite myself, I was hooked on the author's elaborate concealment of the fictional narrator's gender. I believed I deduced it, but I disliked all the characters, and felt neither surprise nor satisfaction nor sorry when the overly foreshadowed "tragedy" was revealed.

The fussy complexity of syntax was just one more stylistic "delay" of revelation: "But in that summer so far from all that was familiar to me, in which I barely believed in my own flesh, which I could bite or pinch or draw blood from, in that summer of strange enclosedness, in which the vast panes of glass in my flat, through which I could observe so much about which I felt so little seemed to travel with me outside into the city, like an invisible protective pope-mobile, I viewed the entire world at a muffled remove, without emotion."

My sentiments exactly.

PS: Curiously, although I was miffed at the way the writing obstructed my easy passage only to end in non-revelation, I find that these stories which I thought failed to make an impression, are deeply recalled after 8 years. !!??

My grades: b:A Simple Tale; c: The Hunters

First story was really good, I was disappointed in the second one. The writing style is just not it for me. Every sentence is just so long and flowery that I forget what’s actually happening, and the plot gets lost in the wording.

This book consists of two stories. The first one, A Simple Tale is fabulous. The second story, The Hunters, is so-so.