This is a 2 for 1 as the book contains 2 novellas. The first is called A Simple Tale and it is essentially. The trauma of it (WWII camp) is distanced by the matter-of-fact narration and the protagonist's work ethic and lack of instrospection. As a young girl, Maria Poniatowski is OST, "taken" from the Ukraine to a Nazi work camp for the duration of the war. She is then a DP living in a refugee camp until she is repatriated in Canada with the Polish husband (Lev) she met in the camp and the baby they conceived. Now she is an immigrant and she and her husband find work, move forward and leave the past behind. She becomes a cleaning lady and her relationship with her clients, especially Mrs. Ellington forms the majority of the story. How the two old women strive to live in the present and form a friendship that transcends class is part of it, as well as the dashed dreams for Maria's only son Rod who should have thrived in a new place given all the advantages of a stable family and country. Maria is clearly a heroine, though vastly understated and underappreciated and her story in all its different parts, "like the fragments of a broken mirror" form a whole that reminds us of the underlying tales of the "least, the last, and the lost."
The second story, the Hunters is well-written but wordy. Understated pyschological drama - mostly interior - for the narrator who is taking a summer sabbatical in London to research her book about death. She has just left a relationship, about which we get no information, but it has taken a toll, as does her subject matter and her abject alone-ness. She gets a flat in a borderline part of town and loves the space itself with its feeling that "someone was happy here" but that soon becomes tainted by the narrator's imagination and her acquaintance with the downstairs neighbor, Ridely Wandor. She is an unattractive woman of indeterminate age who is a carer for the elderly by profession and for her own mother in particular. The title refers rather obliquely to the rabbits the Wandors keep which are their own symbol to decipher. Ridley confides to the narrator that her elderly patients keep dying on her in short order. The narrator, in her own fragile mental state begins to conjure this info into all sorts of scenarios in her mind, none of them seemly. "...I slowed, hibernant, in isolation, and my morbid imagination turned the cememtary soil like any professional gravedigger." p. 144 Ridley is rather needy, so on the few occasions the two meet, the narrator is elevated to "good friend" status, though doesn't share that opinion. The narrator returns to the US when summer ends and moves on with her life in a triumphant fashion comparing this trip to a chrysalis from which she emerges a different person. She doesn't give Ridley another thought until she returns to London with her new lover a year later and comes to know the truth of her story which is way off the mark from her imagination. A cautionary tale about judging by appearance, isolating, and living in your own mind. ( )

(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." ( )

2 stories, one begins in the Ukraine. Reading it now very timely as Russia is trying to reassert itself in that region. How to be an immigrant in a strange land with new rules. The 2nd, is about a displaced writer on sabbatical and how she remains an island for most of the time...

Claire Messud tries SO HARD ALL THE TIME. ( )

There are actually two novellas included in my copy-The Hunters and A Simple Tale and, though they are quite different from eachother, they both possess such an eerie strangeness that make you contemplate them long after you finish. They are memorable in the same subtle sinking way that the characters themselves are memorable to other characters they meet within the novellas. A Simple Tale has a great deal to do with being a Displaced Person or peasant in the Ukraine around the time Hitler came to power. Our protagonist, who remembers her girlhood trauma tells us of her life at the labor camps then immigrating to Canada and starting a family there afterwards. It is just as much about pride, dignity, and family as it is about experiences and things that can never be truly wiped clean. We get a sense of Maria the caretaker and mother...Maria the proud peasant who has very strong opinions and we admire her even though she is strange herself and sometimes distant. I really appreciated another side of the story of the Holocaust and, while it's very important to learn about the persecution of the Jewish population, it seems that isn't the complete story which should be told. I really believe one of the only ways to prevent this atrocity from happening again is to understand all facets of it and this is one facet I hadn't really come across before.

Hunters is a much different sort of novella and takes place in England with a visiting American professor who wants a nice temporary home to write his novel about death. And, of course, he stumbles upon a strange woman who (like Maria in the first novel though quite different in terms of life experiences and personality) is a caretaker. Her problem, however, is that the people she keeps taking care of (elderly mainly) keep dying and so there's a sinking possibility she could be the cause of it that slowly gets planted in our heads and the head of the protagonist. This is a tricky one and there's quite a bit of symbolism between rabbits and Polaroids. The reader really has to examine the situation and the characters closely...I'd say more but I don't want to give anything away.


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